Russian taxi man ‘fell asleep’ before crash

THE suspect in a taxi crash near Red Square that injured two Mexican soccer fans and six other pedestrians as Russia hosts the World Cup told interrogators he fell asleep at the wheel, Moscow city police said yesterday.

The police released a video of an interrogation session with a man the Moscow force identified as the taxi driver. In the recording, he says he briefly dozed off and accidentally hit the accelerator. It was unclear whether the man spoke under duress.

The man in the video says he hadn’t slept in 20 hours and wasn’t drunk, and ran away after the accident because he was afraid bystanders would kill him. He was later detained.

The Moscow city traffic authority identified the driver as 28-year-old Chyngyz Anarbek, who is from Kyrgyzstan.

Speaking to reporters from the town of Muras Ordo in Kyrgyzstan, Anarbek’s older brother said his sibling had only had been working as a taxi driver for a month, and was in ‘stress, shock, horror’ after what happened.

‘Let people say what they want, but my brother is clean, not guilty. He was never and could never be a terrorist,’ Mr Anarbek said.

The younger Anarbek won a bronze medal last year in the world championship of Pankration, an ancient sport combining skills of boxing and wrestling

Videos circulating on Russian social media and some news websites after the incident showed the taxi veering onto the footpath on Saturday and striking pedestrians. The accident took place about 200metres from Red Square and Moscow’s famous GUM shopping arcade, an area popular with tourists.

Viktoria Geranovich, who works nearby and filmed the fleeing driver on her phone, described her shock.

‘I called the ambulance right away,’ she said. ‘I was trembling. It is not a thing you see every day, when a taxi drives right into the crowd.’

Moscow police would not comment on whether the crash would affect security measures for the World Cup, which is being held in 11 Russian cities over the next month.