Moscow/Seoul: A 14-year-old boy in southern Russia has been charged with killing his father with a sledgehammer after his parents tried to stop him from playing computer games, officials said yesterday.
The unnamed boy in the Black Sea coast town of Tuapse, located in Russia's southern Krasnodar region, bludgeoned his father to death while he lay sleeping, regional investigators said in a statement.
"At around 1am on April 12, the suspect dealt his sleeping father at least two blows on the head with a sledgehammer.
"The man died on the spot from a head injury," the region's investigative committee said in a statement.
Disciplinary measure
"The parents had taken away the keyboard as a disciplinary measure after he spent a week playing computer games," a spokeswoman for Krasnodar investigators, Inna Biryukova, said.
After the killing, the boy's frightened mother gave him the keyboard back and the boy played computer games for several more hours until he fell asleep, Biryukova said.
At that point, the mother, who was not injured, contacted relatives who in turn called police.
The boy, who has no criminal record, is now being held in pre-trial detention, Biryukova said.
At 14, he is old enough to be charged with murder under Russian law.
In South Korea, the government is planning to cut off online video games at midnight for school-age children and allow parents to set limits on playing hours to curb problems of internet gaming addiction in the world's most wired country.
The sensational case in March of parents whose infant daughter starved to death while they were playing games on the internet raised concerns in the country about gaming addiction and calls on the government to act.
Under the plan announced this week by the culture ministry, computer game companies were asked to put in place voluntary restrictions by the end of the year for children that also try to cut down on the hours adults play games.
