Police in northwestern Russia have arrested a man who confessed to kidnapping and killing a boy in St. Petersburg late last week.
The man, identified as Pyotr Zhilkin, was arrested Monday in the Pskov region, located more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) southwest of St. Petersburg.
According to local media reports, Zhilkin told law enforcement authorities that he lured the boy into his car on Friday and then beat him to death. He later weighed down the boy’s body with iron pipes in order to submerge it in a pond.
On Tuesday morning, volunteer search and rescue teams found the boy’s body in a frozen pond in the Lomonovsky district, located just west of St. Petersburg in the surrounding Leningrad region.
The Investigative Committee, Russia’s top investigative body, said forensic experts would examine the body as part of a murder probe.
Investigative Committee Chairman Alexander Bastrykin ordered federal investigators to lead the probe into the boy’s death.
A video released by the law enforcement agency showed investigators examining Zhilkin’s car and announcing murder charges against him.
“I was going to turn myself in anyway,” Zhilkin can be heard saying in the video.
The St. Petersburg news outlet Fontanka reported that Zhilkin is originally from the partially occupied Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine. He moved to the southern Rostov region, and later, to St. Petersburg, where he worked as a construction foreman.
Unconfirmed reports suggested that investigators found child pornography on one of Zhilkin’s personal devices. The Investigative Committee said in its statement that “data related to the investigation was found in information carriers and examined,” but did not mention the nature of the data.
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