A priest who opened the first Orthodox chapel in a small eastern Siberian town was killed in a cruel ritualistic murder by a wanderer he once befriended, police said.
The man, armed with a pick he made from a welding tool, came to the home of Hieromonk Grigory, 50, at 3 a.m. Tuesday, said Colonel Ivan Panov, chief of Evenk district police.
He stabbed the priest, whose lay name was Gennady Yakovlev, in the heart and neck, and then cut off his head with a pocket knife, breaking the knife, Panov said.
The man, who gives his name as Roman Krishnin, carried the severed head into the chapel adjoining the priest's home, circled the altar leaving a ring of blood on the floor and placed the head on the altar, Panov said.
He was detained later Tuesday morning and confessed, the police chief said.
"He said he had had an order from his god, Krishna," Panov said by telephone from Tura, a town of about 6,000 in the Evenk autonomous district of the Krasnoyarsk region.
Panov said he suspected Roman had assumed the name Krishnin after the Indian divinity Krishna, who is revered by Hare Krishna, but he doubted he was a member of the religious cult.
"I read about this faith, they don't teach violence," he said.
Panov said the suspect had no documents. He is believed to have come to Tura a year and half ago by foot from the Tyumen region, about 1,000 kilometers away, where he grew up in a hunter's family.
"Father Grigory, the kind soul, may he rest in peace, had hosted him, given him warmth, he even lived in his house for a long time," the police chief said. "They had disputes about faith."
Russian Hare Krishnas were alarmed by early press reports that a Hare Krishna had committed the murder and feared it may ignite hostility toward them.
Sergei Zuyev, head of the Center of Krishna Consciousness Societies in Russia, issued a statement Thursday saying Roman had never been connected with Hare Krishna and emphasizing that its teachings "exclude any violence not only toward men, but even toward animals."
Journalist Svetlana Valeriyeva was at Roman's first interrogation. "In my view, he is a normal man, well-spoken," Valeriyeva said. "He said that he had to purify himself and killed Father Grigory for the good of others."
The death deeply shocked the town, and a memorial service Wednesday attracted many people. The burial is planned for Friday.
"We see the tragedy as a consequence of wide advertising of all sorts of pseudo-religiousness, a return to the wild pagan cults of satanism and cultivation of new types of polytheism," a statement issued by the Krasnoyarsk diocese said.
In 1993, three monks at the Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Kaluga region were stabbed on Easter night by a former monastery employee who said he could not resist an "internal voice" telling him to kill the monks.