MOSCOW, September 23. /TASS/. Detectives announced on Monday that they had uncovered all the circumstances surrounding the malicious murder of Mikhail Krug, a famous Russian chanson singer, who was shot dead in his home in the Tver Region in June 2002.
However, the perpetrator of the crime was killed in 2003, and therefore the criminal investigation has been terminated, the Investigative Committee told TASS.
According to the detectives, late on June 30, 2002, two men broke into Krug’s house in the village of Mamulino during an attempted burglary and one of the perpetrators killed the singer. The investigators failed to solve the murder case despite being in hot pursuit of the culprits due to the lack of eyewitnesses and insufficient evidence.
The detectives suspected that members of the Tver Wolves gang, which was active in the region at that time, could have been behind the homicide. A member of this gang, Alexander Ageyev, was among the suspects, but he fully dismissed the accusations. No evidence was collected to confirm Ageyev’s complicity in the crime. However, this year, the investigators obtained new data on the circumstances of the killing, and the probe was resumed.
Ageyev and another member of the Tver Wolves gang, Alexander Osipov, who had been both sentenced to life for carrying out contract murders, were transferred from their colonies as part of the investigation. Later, Ageyev confessed that he had broken into Krug’s house together with another gang member Dmitry Veselov.
Veselov was killed in March 2003 by Osipov, who is now serving his life sentence. Osipov told the investigators that he was the singer’s acquaintance and fan. He confessed to shooting Veselov dead in a forest as an act of revenge after finding out that he was the one who killed Krug.
"Given that Dmitry Veselov, a suspect in singer Mikhail Krug’s murder, is dead, the investigators made a decision to end the criminal case and this criminal investigation," the IC said.
Ageyev explained to the investigators the motives of the crime, stressing that the singer’s murder had not been thoroughly planned. Acting upon the instructions of a mob boss dubbed Lom, who died in 2006, Ageyev and Veselov were planning to break into Krug’s house right when the singer and his family were expected to be absent. The men only sought to steal antiques and valuables and then leave the scene of the crime.
The original plot was that Krug was expected to ask the mastermind of this burglary for assistance in finding these items and would have to agree to share revenues from his concerts with him in return. However, things took an unexpected turn when Krug and his family returned home. Veselov brutally attacked the singer’s mother-in-law and then shot Krug twice from a loaded TT pistol. The crooner died in a Tver hospital from the gunshot wounds.
Law enforcement officials said Ageyev’s evidence had been fully confirmed by other individuals, and was considered logical, consistent and reflecting the full picture of the crime.