A man in Vladivostok has been charged with allegedly killing a drinking buddy and eating his corpse, while a second man has been arrested in the Penza region for at least six acts of cannibalism that had initially been blamed on someone else, police said Monday.
The Vladivostok resident admitted to butchering his victim and disposing of the body with the help of a friend by eating it, police said in statement.
"The resident confessed that while at the table drinking spirits he killed a 41-year-old acquaintance. After that, he and a friend over several days ate the body," the statement read.
The suspected killer will undergo a psychiatric evaluation and could face up to life in prison if convicted, police said. The friend faces up two years in prison, RIA-Novosti reported.
Meanwhile, police in the Penza region town of Belinsky, nearly 9,000 kilometers west of Vladivostok and 600 kilometers southeast of Moscow, have arrested a local resident suspected of committing at least six acts of murder and cannibalism.
Late last year, another man had been arrested for several of the killings and was convicted of one of them. But when police apprehended 23-year-old Alexander Bychkov for theft, he began talking about corpses he had buried in a dump near his house, Izvestia reported.
Bychkov showed police where he buried some of the bodies, and investigators exhumed six. The actual number of victims may be much higher, the newspaper reported, noting that many "lonely drunks" started going missing in the town back in 2009.
In Bychkov's home, investigators found a diary disclosing intimate details of the crimes, in which he said he killed his victims with a knife, cut out their livers and ate them, Izvestia reported.
Last September, police arrested a severely handicapped man for three of the killings, but he was only tried for one due to a lack of evidence, the newspaper reported. His mother is now fighting for his release.
The two episodes are the latest in a string of macabre cannibalism cases around Russia in recent years.
In May 2011, Moscow police caught a man eating an acquaintance's liver, mid-meal, after linking him to a trail of severed body parts around town. And in 2009, three homeless men were arrested in Perm for killing an acquaintance, eating some of his remains and selling the rest to a local kebab house.
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