Suspended sentence for wife who killed husband in couch

A Russian woman who killed her husband by shutting him inside a folding couch has been given a one-year suspended sentence.

In response to an insulting comment from her husband in July, Vera Lukyanova, 55, closed the folding couch her spouse was lying on, St. Petersburg city prosecutors said in a statement. Lukyanova was drunk at the time, they said.

Her husband was crushed as the couch folded up, and he suffocated after he was unable to free himself, the statement said.

In July, television showed rescue workers sawing through the folding sofa in order to reach the man, who was wearing his underwear and was trapped between the mattress and the back of the couch.

The rescue workers told said that Lukyanova had left her husband for three hours before checking on him and finding him dead.

Lukyanova had been facing up to two years in prison on manslaughter charges. However, St. Petersburg's Vyborgsky District Court handed her a one-year suspended sentence.