Russian gets 14 years in prison for chopping off wife’s hands

MOSCOW: A Russian man, who chopped off both of his wife’s hands with an axe after accusing her of infidelity, was sentenced on Thursday to fourteen years in prison following a huge outcry in Russia. Last December, after dropping off their two children at daycare, Dmitry Grachyov took his wife Margarita to a forest outside Moscow where he tied tourniquets around her arms and chopped off her hands with an axe. Before hacking off her limbs he cut off her fingers. After that he drove the bleeding woman to a hospital, giving medics a shoebox containing her severed right hand. He then gave himself up. On Thursday, Grachyov was sentenced to 14 years in a high-security penal colony, said a spokeswoman for a court in the town of Serpukhov, located some 100 kilometres south of Moscow. The man was also ordered to pay more than 2 million rubles ($30,000) as compensation for moral damages. He was earlier stripped of custody of their two children. Margarita, 26, said she had wanted her ex-husband to be given life in prison.