MOSCOW. Feb 11 (Interfax) - State Duma speaker Sergei Naryshkin has said that he does not support the idea of reviving the death penalty.
"My attitude to execution as a form of punishment is negative," he said on Monday responding to a request from the press to comment on the opinion of Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev.
In a Sunday interview with NTV channel, Kolokoltsev said that as a citizen he sees nothing wrong with the death sentence for brutal crimes.
"I may incur anger from opponents of the death penalty. But as a citizen, not as a minister, I don't think it would be wrong to exercise this punishment for such criminals," he said on a program, broadcast for Russia's eastern regions on Sunday evening.
Kolokoltsev's statement came in the wake of reports about the murder of girls in Tatarstan and the Irkutsk region and in reaction to the host of the program Kirill Pozdnyakov's remark that the public has been increasingly in favor of restoring the death penalty.