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shot in podyezd |
connected w/ Russian sports |
murder for less than $100 |
really stupid criminal |
explosive device |
cries for help ignored |
perp in body count |
children |
"investigation continuing" |
carved up like a turkey |
cannibalism |
riddled with bullets |
related to victim's job |
A Little Joy Ride
Here's a great story about how clumsy you have to be in this country to get arrested for murder. One week ago in Yaroslavl, a gang of thieves-a man and two women (police have not yet released their names)-burgled an apartment. In accordance with the new trend toward absolute lack of caution,
they knocked over the apartment while
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| "Wow, I didn't know I looked like that inside!"
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the residents themselves were still home. The culprits knew the husband and wife occupants and demanded, as they carted out the television and stereo, they they hand over the keys to he BMW they had parked downstairs. The husband refused and was shot to death instantly in front of his wife, who subsequently handed over the keys and joined the merry gang as a hostage. Now, here's where the story gets interesting. The gang was an some kind of strange Natural Born Killers crime binge and decided that instant to leave Yaroslavl forever and hit the road, so they tossed their hostage in the back seat and headed for Moscow. A few hours later they were speeding down the 44th kilometer of the Yaroslavskoye Shosse in the Pushkinsky Region of the Moscow Oblast when they slammed into a Volga, driving the car off the road. To theft, murder, and kidnapping, they added a hit and run violation and sped down the road. The Volga driver got back in his car and drove to a roadside telephone, where he called the police and reported having been hit by a white BMW. Police immediately dispatched patrol cars all along the Yaroslovskoye Shosse and within a half hour located the white BMW in the woods less than a kilometer from the accident site. When they descended upon the car, they found the hostage kneeling in the ground clutching her throat, where she'd been sliced with a knife. Apparently the crew had decided, after the accident, to execute their hostage right away, in case they got in a more serious accident where her presence might have presented a problem. Police literally caught the group red-handed; the two women were in the process of repeatedly slicing the victim's throat when the police arrived. The female gang members were caught, while the male managed to escape in the woods. However, the victim recovered in the hospital and gave police a description of her captor, and he was caught at a train station in Zelenogorsk a few days later.
Beavis and Butthead, Russian Style
Fire! Fire! Fire!
Life is tough in the village of Kamenka, a farming town in the Smolenskaya Oblast. The local sovkhoz no longer functions and state employees haven't seen their salaries since before the New Year. Life is dull, hopeless, and disorganized. There's no summer school, so kids tend to spend a lot of time off playing by the Moscow-Minsk Highway, the only place near the village where anything ever moves. The big summer activity for kids is sniffing gasoline, which they buy in half-liter jugs for 800 rubles. Two of the biggest gasoline addicts in town were Pavel Mikheenkov, 11, and Anton Malyarenko, 13. Their daily routine usually consisted of whiffing out on high-octane gas and torturing the animals that came to hang around the gas station. They were so industrious that local villagers eventually complained when many of the local cats started wandering back to town without ears. They moved on from cats to frogs to dogs and then finally, this past August, collared a six year-old boy named Sasha Petrochenkov near the local school stadium and tied him to a tree. Deciding, as they later described it, that it would be "interesting to watch," they poured gasoline over Sasha's head and set him on fire. A five year-old named Ruslan Borisov, Sasha's friend, wandered by and soon found his ears on fire. When the flames went out the boys shrugged and moved on. Ruslan rushed to his parents, and soon adults came to retrieve Sasha, but within two hours he was dead from the burns. Malyarenko was deported back to his native Tashkent, but Mikheenkov will remain in Kamenka and not be punished.
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| "Got any Alka-Seltzer? My stomach is really acting up."
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According to Kriminalnaya Khronika, the city administration has to pay 15 million rubles in order to have him sent to a reform school, and the town doesn't have the money. The victim's mother, Svetlana Petrochenko, has been told she can have her son's killer sent away if she digs up the money herself, but failing that must live with him in the village. Incidentally, the police uncovered, in their investigation, that Mikheenkov had been drinking vodka regularly with his parents since the age of four. Nice town. And we thought Cleveland was bad. World Bank officials declined comment on the efficacy of municipal budget cuts, though consultants are on stand-by... for a fee.
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