Even if an ex-deputy commissioner of Calarasi insisted that he wasn’t driving the car when an accident in which a colleague of his died occurred, the court sentenced him to four years behind bars. The accident happened on the Ungheni – Chisinau road, near Cornesti village, in October 2009, IPN reports.

According to the Prosecutor General’s Office, that evening the deputy commissioner was driving a police car under the influence of alcohol. An inferior officer was travelling with him. The car skidded off the road and crashed into a building that earlier housed the Water Pumping Station of Cornesti village of Ungheni district. The passenger died on the spot.

Immediately after the accident, the vice commissioner was taken to the district hospital for a blood alcohol test. But he refused to be tested and left the medical institution. According to the prosecutors, even if the collected evidence showed the deputy commissioner was to blame for the accident, this insisted that the car that night was driven by the officer who died.

In 2011, the Ungheni Court put the deputy commissioner on probation, but the prosecutors challenged the sentence. Recently, the Balti Appeals Court quashed the decision of the first court and passed a new decision, by which the culprit was sentenced to four years in jail and banned from driving for a four-year period. He was also obliged to pay 100,000 lei in respect of non-pecuniary damage and 18,000 lei court costs to the successor of the victim. The decision is not yet definitive.