Bastrykin instructed to look into the case of a taxi driver who insulted Russians

The head of the Investigative Committee (IC) of Russia, Alexander Bastrykin, requested a report on the progress of the criminal case regarding the illegal actions of a taxi driver who insulted Russians. About it reported in the department’s Telegram channel.

The Investigative Committee responded to reports that in Moscow a taxi driver “spoke negatively about Russian citizens and removed passengers participating in a special military operation (SVO) from the car.” A criminal case was opened under Article 282 of the Criminal Code “Inciting hatred, enmity, and humiliation of human dignity.” I was instructed to report on the investigation. O. Head of the Main Investigative Directorate of the Russian Investigative Committee for Moscow Vitaly Saksin.

According to the taxi passengers, the driver suddenly stopped the car on the Moscow Ring Road. After that, he demanded that the passengers leave the cabin. After their refusal, the taxi driver ran out onto the roadway and called two taxi drivers for help – “the same as his brothers,” as one of the Russians put it.

The driver himself, Aipbek Latipov, claims that the men who got into his taxi were drunk and inappropriate, and in addition, they chose an address that was 100 kilometers from the starting point as the end point of the trip. During the trip, they changed the payment method to cash and the taxi driver informed the passengers that he was forced to stop the trip. The context in which SVO and the Crocus terrorist attack were mentioned was alarming: passengers made xenophobic remarks about migrants making money in Russia, despite events in the country.