CHISINAU—Russian traffic police have to be ready for anything.
On Saturday morning policemen in the Leningrad region approached a Mitsubishi crashed at a fence and left on the side of a highway, where they discovered a beheaded dead body with multiple stab wounds on the ground, and human blood and a shovel inside the vehicle.
The corpse fell out of the vehicle’s trunk when it hit the fence, the news agency Tass reported.
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The police arrested three suspects later in the day and on Monday one of them, 23-year-old Yegor Komarov, stood before the court in the Leningrad region—and admitted that he was a man-eater.
Thousands of people watched the video of the court hearing, which was leaked to social media on Monday. In the video, a young man with a shaved head says, from behind bars: “I nibbled to just take a taste.”
His interrogator asks: “Are you ready to eat a human again?”
Komarov answers with what seems to be curiosity: “Do you have some?”
The body from the Mitsubishi belonged to 50-year-old Arkad Kazyanin, an Armenian national and a resident of St.Petersburg. Komarov admitted killing Kazyanin. The court now has until Jan. 20 to formally charge Komarov.
In the video, Komarov also admitted he had previously killed and ate a person “without any reason,” just to see what they tasted like, reportedly referring to the dead body of a 38-year-old broker that was found with multiple stab wounds inside a plastic drain pipe in the Sosnovka village of the Leningrad region last September.
Komarov showed police that crime scene and admitted to murdering the broker, who has not been publicly named. He also said that he had “hunted” for victims in a local park where there are no security cameras. According to a report by a well-respected publication, Fontanka, he also admitted to cutting off a part of his victim’s body, cooking and eating it at home.
Online media 47news reported that during the interrogation police took Komarov's handcuffs off, and he screamed: "What are you doing, I can bite you to death!"
"Police thanked Komarov for his confession, twisted his arms behind this time and put the handcuffs back on,” the report said.
Every Russian has heard or read heartbreaking stories about starving people eating each other during the siege of Leningrad, which killed up to 800,000 people during WWII. NKVD investigated more than 1,000 people accused of cannibalism during and after the war. But somebody killing another human out of curiosity was shocking.
Users of the popular VK social network’s “On skazal Kratos!” group described Komarov as a “nationalist” in a post on Tuesday. “You walk on the streets, stroll in the parks without any clue that some pedestrian who looks like an ordinary man, could turn out to be a man eater,” the post said. “A far-right maniac killed and ate a man -–nobody is going to distribute such news, instead they will publish about migrants fights and that would become an event of the week and their bases for the ‘race view’ on the universe.”
In fact, both independent and propagandist publications have reported on Komarov’s case. The online paper Fontanka has been reporting on murder investigations in St.Petersburg since 2000. The Daily Beast asked Fontanka’s editor, Alexander Gorshkov, about the official source for the cannibalism story. “The press service of St.Petersburg and Leningrad region courts,” Gorshkov responded.
According to Fontanka’s Sunday report, Komarov told the police that he regretted murdering the broker: “But I killed that one in Sosnovka in vain, It turned out he was not tasty.”
