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Man apprehended in Kazan over suspected murder of 26 elderly women pleads guilty

The motive behind the crimes was theft, according to the testimony

MOSCOW, December 1. /TASS/. A man, apprehended in Russia’s Tatarstan over suspicion of murder of 26 elderly women in 12 regions of Russia, pleaded guilty, according to a video of the questioning, published by the Ministry of the Interior.

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"[I’ve been apprehended] over a suspicion of murder of grannies. I cannot remember every episode. I found them randomly near a market or a store, watched them, carried their bags home. Sometimes, they invited me in, sometimes I insisted, pretending to be a property management company employee. I strangled them. A quiet, quick [method], painless for them, so I thought. [I killed them] to rob them. I could have left them alive, but I didn’t, all my victims were elderly," the suspect says.

Previously, the media reported that a 38-year old local with a criminal record Radik Tagirov was apprehended in Kazan. The Investigative Committee spokeswoman, Svetlana Petrenko told TASS, that his genetic material was sampled for forensic expertise. The man, currently employed as a locksmith, was sentenced for theft in 2009. He is suspected of murdering 26 elderly women in 2011-2012 in 12 regions of the Central, Volga and Ural federal districts.

Petrenko disclosed that the suspect was identified after conducting over 10,000 comparative genetic tests and after genotype match was found in criminal record databases. Forensic research determined that all crimes had been commited by the same person. The Ministry of the Interior spokeswoman, Irina Volk told TASS that the suspect was apprehended in an apartment on Glavnaya Street in Kazan.

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