Two young men arrested in Russia on suspicion of killing and eating a girl

TWO young men - one a butcher - have been arrested on suspicion of killing and dismembering a 16-year-old girl and eating parts of her body, Russian prosecutors claim.
The girl disappeared after leaving her home in St. Petersburg for school on January 19, city prosecutor's spokesman Sergei Kapitonov said. He said she was killed that night, and that body parts believed to be hers were later found in plastic bags scattered around the city.
Police arrested Yuri Mozhnov, a florist, and Maxim Golovatskhikh, a street-market butcher and one-time psychiatric patient, Kapitonov said. Prosecutors believe they drowned the girl in a bathtub, cut her body into pieces and ate some of her internal organs.

"The arrestees said they ate the girl's body parts because they were hungry," Kapitonov said. They told investigators they baked some of her insides with potatoes in a stove, he said.

They allegedly then bagged up her remains and disposed of them in garbage containers and bodies of water. He said both men are being held on suspicion of murder.

The suspects, both 19, knew the victim, and she accompanied them voluntarily to an apartment rented by another acquaintance on the day she went missing, Kapitonov said.

They were arrested Saturday, a day after plastic bags - one containing a girl's head and others holding other body parts - were found at least two separate locations, he said.

St. Petersburg news Web site fontanka.ru cited a top city prosecutor, Andrei Lavrenko, as saying investigators believe the suspects decided to kill the victim after an argument erupted between her and Golovatskikh.
Prosecutors referred to the body parts as the girl's, but Moscow-based tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda on Wednesday cited a department head at the St. Petersburg forensic medicine office, Vitaly Sysoyev, as saying they had not been positively identified as hers and that the alleged victim was still officially listed as missing. "Her father could not recognize her," Sysoyev was quoted as saying.

Kapitonov said he was unaware of such information.
Without citing a source, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that the suspects at first denied involvement. But, the newspaper said, after investigators found suspicious evidence at the apartment, they acknowledged drowning her and eating a calf muscle and part of her left hip - supposedly a Satanic practice.

Lavrenko said investigators found traces of blood when they ripped out plumbing and floorboards in the apartment, fontanka.ru reported.
Mozhnov was convicted of robbery in 2005, while accusations against Golovatskikh of murder threats and cruelty to animals were subsequently dropped, Kapitonov said. He said Golovatskikh had been treated in the past at a psychiatric hospital.

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