Russian civil servant tried to eat evidence

Crooked civil servant Anton Gritsay has set a new record for eating the evidence after munching his way through a 35,000 rouble (£800) bribe to stop it being seized as evidence. But Gritsay, head of the Emergencies Ministry in Zelenograd, Russia, failed to escape the long arm of the law after determined officers took the 38-year-old to the local hospital. Once there surgeons recovered seven of the notes from his stomach that were enough to see him taken to court.

Eating bribes has become a popular trend in Russia, leading to the league table that started in March 2010 when a policeman ate a 2,000 rouble bribe in the Chelyabinsk region. The previous recordholder was another policeman from the Saratov region who swallowed 15,000 roubles in March 2011.



Gritsay who was tipped off that he was about to be arrested and locked himself into a toilet at the Ministry was arrested by anticorruption cops when he already had all the money in his mouth. Despite attempts to get him to open his mouth they failed and he managed to swallow all the notes.

The arrest was filmed by other officers and a police spokesman said: "We investigated after a complaint that he had been paid a bribe to overlook breaches in safety standards during a fire safety inspection. He has pleaded guilty to accepting a bribe and was released on bail, and has been fired from his job.