By Vestnik Kavkaza
Traffic accidents involving priests driving luxury cars caused furious a reaction in Russian society.
At first BMW Z4 with diplomatic plates, which was driven by the beneficiary of the Prophet Elijah in the Obydensky Lane Father Superior Timofey (Podobedov) crashed into a car and crossed into the oncoming lane and crashed into another car. People involved in the accident stated that the priest was drunk.
Now the court is considered the accident which happened last summer on the Kutuzivsky Avenue when a Mercedes G500 which belonged to hieromonch Elijah (Pavel Semin) ran into polymer blocks enclosing road works. According to investigation, the priest hit three workers, two of them died at the scene.
Even though investigation continues, social opinion doesn’t support Semin. The mass media write about pressure on investigation by “unknown, but very powerful people”, about mystically disappeared witnesses of the accident, while bloggers ironically ask: “How will inappropriate behavior of a priest influence my personal salvation?”
Lawyers of the hieromonch call for not making preliminary conclusions before the end of the investigation. “Our client Pavel Semin said the following: “Yes, I am guilty of the accident because my car ran into a car driving in front of me,”” lawyer Vitaly Veremchuk says. “From the very beginning the mass media wrote as if Pavel was driving at a very high speed, then crossed the fence, crashed into Skoda and flipped over. We state that Pavel didn’t get into the zone of road works.”
Semin’s lawyer Nikolai Kashirtsev stated that the investigation expertise didn’t answer the question what car hit people: “The conducted expertise didn’t give a clear answer; and it was written that a complex technical expertise was needed, but they rejected our request. Gathered evidence denies the fact that it was Semin who hit the workers.”
The actor and the former priest Ivan Okhlabystin also believes that there is no evidence of Semin’s guilt of the accident, while social reaction and presented accusation were caused by the fact that the accident took place during investigation of the scandalous act in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior by Pussy Riot. Okhlobystin thinks that instead of imprisonment which threatens father Elijah, it would be better to send him to a monastery: “He would leave a prison some day or wouldn’t as a criminal, but I would better close him in a monastery till the end of his days.”
