MOSCOW, June 25 (RAPSI) - A court in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area has sentenced a father to 16 years in prison for drowning his four-year-old daughter to free himself from having to pay child support, the Investigative Committee reported on Tuesday.

According to the committee, on September 6, 2011, Alexander Molyakevich from the town of Raduzhny pushed his daughter into a pit partially filled with water "to avoid further expenses in the form of child support."

The child drowned.

The police have registered a number of similar cases in Russia in recent years.

On June 24 the Moscow Regional Court sentenced a local woman who pushed her two sons from the balcony to compulsory medical treatment.

According to the investigators, Galina Ryabkova lured her two sons, one aged four and the other seven, onto a communal balcony on the fifteenth floor of their apartment building and pushed them over the handrail. The boys died.

The court found Ryabkova guilty of murder committed in a state of mental derangement. According to a forensic psychiatric examination, Ryabkova suffers from a mental disorder and was not aware of what she was doing.

In October 2011, a Nizhny Novgorod mother leapt from a 16th floor window while cradling her one-year-old child in her arms. In April 2011, a grandmother strangled and buried the two-month-old infant her daughter had been deemed unfit to care for.

In 2008, a Siberian mother threw her seven-year-old daughter from a fifth-story window twice. When the first fall failed to prove fatal, the mother carried her daughter back upstairs for a second attempt, which killed the young girl instantly.