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Irkutsk Police Detain Two 18-Year-Olds After a Relative Hands In a Camera Tying Them to Akademgorodok Killings

Artyom Anoufriev and Nikita Lytkin were charged with four murders within days. In 2013 a court gave Anoufriev life and Lytkin 24 years for a series that killed six.

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Illustration of a police car and two officers outside Soviet-era apartment blocks on a thawing spring night. Not an actual scene from the case.

For four months, a string of killings and attacks frightened Irkutsk's Akademgorodok district. On the night of April 5, 2011, police detained two 18-year-old local men after a relative brought in a video camera.

According to the newspaper Irkutsky Reporter, a relative of Nikita Lytkin's who had lent him the camera handed it to an officer at a local police post at about 10 p.m. on Tuesday, April 5. It held a recording, made on the evening of April 3, of two young men desecrating the body of a murdered woman. About 20 officers detained Lytkin and Artyom Anoufriev, a medical university student, at their homes that night, and both confessed within minutes to all the killings and attacks in the district, the paper said. Within days they were charged with four murders: of a woman who worked at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in December 2010, of two men on February 21 and March 11, 2011, and of a woman born in 1948 on April 3.

The series had begun in December 2010 with the death of a 12-year-old boy, which investigators first ruled an accident. By June 2011 investigators suspected the pair in six murders and 10 attacks. On April 2, 2013, the Irkutsk Regional Court sentenced Anoufriev to life in prison and Lytkin to 24 years, convicting them of murders and attempted murders and of creating an extremist group. In all, six people were killed, a boy, three men and two women, and nine were injured. Lytkin confessed to everything and expressed remorse, while Anoufriev admitted only one murder and one desecration of a body.

Vesti-Irkutsk reported in June 2011 that the last killing in the series took place on the morning of March 11, while Irkutsky Reporter had said the pair were charged with killing a woman on April 3.

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