St. Petersburg police shot an ultranationalist murder suspect in the backside after he charged at them with a knife as they tried to arrest him Tuesday.
Andrei "Fighter" Malyugin, 27, lived up to his name when police came for him at an apartment building on Dunaisky Prospekt where he was holed up, local news site Fontanka.ru .
Malyugin maced one officer in the face and threatened to stab another, ignoring a warning shot, Interfax said. The next shot was fired at him.
"My colleagues used force properly, and now the Fighter will be ashamed to have a wound in that area," city police chief Sergei Umnov told Fontanka.ru.
Malyugin, who once served in the North Caucasus but was discharged for excessive cruelty, was one of two people cleared in the trial of a local gang of 14 skinheads, convicted in June of killing seven nonwhites in the mid-2000s, news reports said.
But the police have linked him to the deaths of two other people since walking out of pretrial detention two months ago.
One victim, a native Korean, was found strangled and wrapped in a carpet in July in an apartment that Malyugin and a friend had advertised online, the authorities said.
Later that month, a skinhead who briefly shared a cell with the gang's convicted ringleader had his throat slashed after Malyugin confronted him, allegedly for badmouthing the ringleader and the ringleader's wife, Olga, whom he married in pretrial detention.
Malyugin faces up to 20 years in prison if charged and convicted of murder.
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