Former Russian regional governor sentenced to 22 years in prison

Popular ousted Khabarovsk region governor Sergei Furgal was sentenced by a Russian court to 22 years in prison after it found him guilty of attempted murder and ordering contract killings of business rivals.

Furgal denied the charges, which related to alleged crimes from 2004 and 2005 when he was a prominent local businessman in Russia's far east, Reuters reports.

His 2020 arrest sparked a major wave of anti-Kremlin protests in the Khabarovsk region.

In a statement posted on Telegram, Russia's prosecutor general's office said: "The court established that Furgal and his accomplice, guided by selfish motives and a desire to increase the income of a commercial organization controlled by him, ... created an organised group in 2004 to commit murders of competitors."

Speaking at the court outside Moscow, Boris Kozhemyakin, a lawyer on Furgal's defence team, said the verdict was "unlawful" and that he and his colleagues would appeal and seek an acquittal.

His detention sparked a wave of large protests in the region, with tens of thousands of locals coming out onto the streets for weeks in his support. His backers said the charges were politically motivated, to punish him for taking too independent a line from Moscow.

Representing the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, Furgal had won a surprise election victory in 2018, when he rode a wave of anti-Moscow sentiment to oust a sitting pro-Kremlin governor by a landslide margin - a shock result in Russia's tightly controlled electoral system.

President Vladimir Putin fired Furgal days after his arrest in 2020, citing "loss of trust", and installed a more pro-Moscow figure in his place.