Driver with 2,000 traffic violations arrested in Moscow By News from Elsewhere...

...as found by BBC Monitoring Published duration 11 February

image copyright Moscow police image caption The driver received 184 tickets on top of the 2,126 he already had

Traffic police in Moscow were in for a surprise when they stopped an expensive car in the Russian capital's most exclusive suburb of Rublyovka.

It turned out that the driver's licence had expired, but it was only one of the 2,000-plus violations he had committed.

The driver was reluctant to leave his car as the officers required, and they had to break a window to get him out - as can be seen in a video the Interior Ministry posted online.

The driver - who was not named - was then taken to a police station, where it emerged that he already had 184 unpaid fines.

media caption Watch: Police had to smash a window to extract the offender from the car

"An Odintsovo town judge in Moscow Region handed the driver seven days in detention, after which he will be held accountable... for not paying the fines," the Moscow police said. Sadly their spokesman did not itemise the driver's epic list of traffic violations.

Russia's roads are notoriously dangerous. According to official statistics, more than 14,300 Russians died in traffic accidents in 2018, which is almost twice the number of murder victims in the country.

And The World Health Organisation ranked Russia 104th out of 175 countries the same year in terms of the number of road deaths - 18 out of 100,000 members of the public.

Reporting by Vitaly Shevchenko

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