Police have detained three Russian soldiers suspected of killing two nurses in a psychiatric ward of a military hospital in St. Petersburg, where the men were patients, the RBC news agency reported Tuesday.
The nurses' bodies were found shortly after midnight Monday, the Interfax news agency quoted a spokesperson for Russia's Western Military District as saying.
After an hours-long search for the three missing patients, who had fled the scene, Russian border guards spotted them while on patrol near the border with Finland, St. Petersburg's independent Fontanka news portal reported.
The men were detained outside the town of Svetlogorsk, near the border, the report said.
The nurses are believed to have been killed after one of them caught the men trying to take their paperwork from the nurses' station in the military hospital's psychiatric ward, Fontanka reported.
Several other patients said they were alerted by shouts, looked out of their rooms and saw one of the suspects, a contract serviceman in Russia's interior troops, leaving the nurses' station carrying a knife, Fontanka reported.
Another of the suspects was a student at the Mozhaisky Military Space Academy, an unidentified law-enforcement official was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.
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