Feb. 11 (UPI) — A Russian teenager was sent to prison on Thursday for supposedly “training” for terrorist activities and other charges that included blowing up a virtual government intelligence building on the video game “Minecraft.”
A military court in Siberia sentenced the boy, 16-year-old Nikita Uvarov, to five years for the charges — which stemmed from anti-government leaflets he’d handed out and videos on cellphones belonging to Uvarov and at least two others.
Authorities also said they’d uncovered a plot by the teens to blow up a virtual building belonging to the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, that they’d built in the block-building game “Minecraft.”
The FSB is the top intelligence and security service in Russia and the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
The two other teenagers were given suspended sentences on Thursday because they cooperated with prosecutors in the case against Uvarov.
The case against Uvarov follows a number of other controversial anti-terrorist prosecutions in Russia. In 2020, several young activists were jailed for supposedly planning a coup and other terror-related charges. Some of them claimed that Russian authorities effectively beat confessions out of them — a claim similar to what Uvarov said in court on Thursday.
“I am not a terrorist, I am not guilty,” he said, according to The Moscow Times. “I would just like to finish my studies, get an education and go somewhere far away from here, somewhere I don’t irritate anyone from the special services.”
Uvarov also told the court that he never planned to blow anything up.
