Moscow nationalist student confesses killing 37 people

Moscow, May 28 (UNI) A young Russian nationalist student, suspected of killing an Armenian businessman Karen Abramyan, has confessed of killing 37 people together with his friend, reports said.

Artur Ryno, a student of the Kiselev Icon Painting School, who was detained in April, told the police that he ''since school hated people from the Caucasus who come to Moscow, unite and oppress Russians,'' Vremya Novosti reported.

Ryno said he suddenly realised ''the city needed to be cleaned'' and started with his friend Pavel Skachevsky, a student of Russia's State University of Physical Culture, attacking and killing dark-skinned people in Moscow's suburbs.

They did not confess to the Armenian's murder until a videotape from surveillance cameras installed at the building's entrance, where Abramyan lived was shown to them, the daily said.

Prosecutors said Ryno and Skachevsky, both aged 18, were detained after an eyewitness called the police, telling them that the two who stabbed Abramyan 20 times escaped in a street-car.

Police stopped the street-car and arrested the two students whose clothes and a knife with them were covered in blood.

''At first we doubted whether what Ryno said was true. He mentioned too many details and boasted about what he had done, but at the same time the dates and crime scenes named were not precise. But the investigations we have carried out confirm that everything he says is true,'' a police source said.

However, Ryno's accomplice, Skachevsky denied attacking anyone.

The two suspected serial killers carried out their first killing on August 21, 2006, which coincided with an explosion carried out by skinheads at Moscow's Cherkizovsky market, where many traders from the North Caucasus region, former Central Asian Soviet republics, as well as Vietnam and China worked.

The explosion left 11 people dead and at least 49 injured.

Ryno said when they were attacking people, bystanders did not interfere, preferring to leave the crime scene as quickly as possible.

UNI