Denis Saunin
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Denis Saunin is a Russian war veteran of the Chechen war, who brutally tortured and murdered his friend, Yelena Skoryatina, after she lied that she had fought on the separatists' side in Chechnya as a sniper.
The woman, went missing after a party with colleagues at a furniture factory where she worked. Police started investigating the incident and soon began to suspect that the woman had been murdered — they found blood spots on the floor of the room where the party took place. Investigators suspected two men who left the room last on the day when the victim was last seen. Soon, one of them, Denis Saunin, confessed to murder, but said that the victim deserved it.
Investigators established that Skoryatina's story was nothing but drunken bravado. She had been short-sighted from early childhood and had never left her native town of Ulyanovsk for more than a week.
[edit] Murder
Saunin told investigators that on the day when the murder took place he had been telling his colleagues about the atrocities committed by Chechen terrorists. The victim started arguing with him and said that Chechens were fighting for their freedom.
"She said that Maskhadov and Basayev were good people and at the end said that she had been a sniper with Chechen troops and taken out our boys," Saunin told the investigators. "The light dimmed in my eyes as she said this and I thought — I must avenge them. I thought 'Skoryatina is not leaving this party alive'," he added.
After everybody had left, Saunin, a guard at a factory, battered the woman and then put out her right eye, because it is used in shooting and cut off the index finger on her right hand — the finger used to pull the trigger, as well as the middle finger on her left hand as it is used in an obscene gesture after a good shot. "She cried and begged for mercy but I could not stop — the faces of our boys killed by Chechen snipers stood before my eyes," the killer said.
He did not stop at that. The veteran then stripped the woman, shoved the fingers he'd cut off into her vagina and slit the victim's throat. Upon finishing the brutal murder, Saunin called his brother, they put the body into a bag with sawdust and buried it in the nearby garage block.
Both brothers have been arrested and charged with murder. Saunin will undergo a psychiatric examination to test his sanity, investigators told the Ekspress-Gazeta newspaper .
