KALININGRAD. Aug 6 (Interfax-Northwest) - Servicemen of the Baltic Fleet's missile boat brigade have murdered an officer from their unit.
On Tuesday, the Baltic Fleet's press service circulated an official report addressing the crime. The report said that in the early hours of August 5, Lieutenant Captain Pavel Lipchik, a duty officer for the coastal base of the missile boat brigade, went to check the sentry posts and disappeared.
In the early hours of August 6, a joint search operation involving the military prosecutor's office, the military counter- intelligence service and the unit's command discovered the officer's mutilated body. It was thoroughly hidden in an area near the unit's base.
The fleet's law enforcement agencies have also established that at around 6:00 a.m. on August 5, Lipchik encountered drunken sailors Pyotr Myasnikov, Dmitry Selchikov and Yevgeny Baldin. In response to the officer's order to stop violating military discipline, the sailors savagely beat and later drowned him.
Lipchik graduated from the Kaliningrad higher naval college in 1998. He has good reputation in his unit, the press service report reads.
Myasnikov, 20, was recruited for active-duty service from the Tomsk region in autumn 2000. He has bad reputation in his unit. In February 2002, he was sentenced to two-year conditional imprisonment for fuel theft. Selchikov was tried for the same crime and got the same sentence. He was recruited from the Kaliningrad region in December 2000.
Baldin, a surgeon's assistant from the Zyb small rocket vessel, was recruited from the Kirov region in summer 2001. He did not commit any serious violations before.