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By Brendan Cole
Senior Reporter
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A retired judge in Russia who had been involved in high-profile political cases has died after falling from an apartment block window.
Natalia Larina, 50, was found dead outside her apartment block in the southeast of Moscow at 8 a.m. Wednesday morning, according to Russian news outlets, which listed a suspected suicide as a cause and said she had left a note.
Since the start of Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there has been a spate of mysterious deaths of high-level Russian officials, tycoons, oil executives and businessmen, a number of whom met their demise by falling out windows.
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There is no evidence that Larina's death has any link to the war or her previous job.
Newsweek reached out to the Russian Interior Ministry for comment.
The Baza Telegram channel said that in the middle of May, Larina had been the victim of a telephone scam. Someone claiming to be her former boss contacted her, saying that attempts were being made to steal money from her account to send to Ukraine to fund its armed forces. According to Baza, she was told she would be contacted by Russian special services and Russia's Central Bank.
She was persuaded to transfer one million rubles ($11,200) to a "safe account" and borrow another one million rubles from the bank to be transferred. She notified the police when she realized she had been scammed, Baza said.
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"The woman was very worried about what happened. As a result, all this led to a tragedy," said the outlet, which reported that she had a daughter who was a minor.
Larina had retired six months ago after working at Moscow's Tagansky Court for more than 15 years, the Russian state-run Tass news agency reported.
She was known for her role in high-profile cases, including one in 2006, which restrained the activities of the National Bolshevik Party in what was called the "Tagansky Case," Tass reported.
She was also the judge in the trial of the performance artist and opposition activist Pyotr Pavlensky, who, in 2015, set fire to the entrance of the headquarters of Russia's main intelligence agency, for which he was convicted of vandalism and fined 500,000 rubles ($5,600).
In 2011, she was the judge in the trial of a Russian Transport Ministry official who was convicted of raping his daughter, and in 2019, she sentenced Murat Sabanov, who had carried out a series of poisonings in central Moscow.
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