BERLIN -- Four days after escaping from a Potsdam prison using bedsheets tied together, a Russian accused of kidnapping a man and leaving him to die in a pit was rearrested Wednesday.
Sergei Serov, 38, was arrested in an apartment in Berlin just as he was shaving his head - apparently for a disguise, police said. The person living in the apartment had found Serov shivering on the street the night before and invited him in out of pity, police said. The next morning the renter became suspicious that his house guest might be Serov, whose picture was all over the media.
He called police, who surrounded the building and sent a special commando team in to arrest the man.
Serov and Vyacheslav Orlov, 28, are to go on trial early next year on charges of kidnapping leading to death. Authorities said the two had made partial confessions in the case of Matthias Hintze, 20, who was kidnapped Sept. 14, 1997, and buried in a pit, where he suffocated.
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