Suspects in the murders of businessmen detained in Tyumen

The alleged leader of a local criminal group, Viktor Savin, and three of his accomplices were detained in the Tyumen region. According to investigators, gang members were involved in murders and robberies against local businessmen for seven years. The attacks were brazen and victims were often tortured. The detainees refuse to cooperate with the investigation, despite the fact that an entire arsenal of unregistered weapons was confiscated from them.

The detention of Viktor Savin, who, according to investigators, is the leader of a gang that terrorized businessmen from the Tyumen and Sverdlovsk regions for seven years, was reported in the investigative department of the Investigative Committee for the Tyumen Region. “Criminal cases have been initiated against three members of the gang and their alleged leader under Article 209 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Banditry”), Article 162 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Robbery”) and Article 105 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Murder”). All of them are in custody,” the department noted. It is known that the alleged bandits were detained the other day by criminal investigation officers, who found them based on “operational information.”

According to the materials of the criminal case, Tyumen resident Viktor Savin decided to create a gang in the fall of 2008 and recruited his son and two mutual friends into it. As the Tyumen Region Ministry of Internal Affairs explained to Kommersant, whose detectives are involved in operational support of the case, during the searches a significant arsenal of weapons was seized from the defendants in the case - a Kalashnikov assault rifle, a Makarov pistol, three hunting rifles, a Tiger carbine, several hundred rounds of ammunition. In addition, two bulletproof vests were found, in which, presumably, the detainees participated in the robberies.

According to detectives, from 2008 to 2014, gang members committed at least seven murders and a series of daring robberies in the Tyumen and Sverdlovsk regions. Many of them caused a wide public response in Tyumen. For example, in January last year, criminals broke into the private house of a large Tyumen landowner, director of Kamenskoye JSC Valery Kalugin. Having tied up the businessman and his wife, the bandits began to torture the man, finding out where he kept his cash and jewelry. According to investigators, the raiders knew that the businessman kept about 2 million rubles in the house. Not finding any money in the safe, the robbers broke the businessman’s arms and legs with a tire iron, and then began drilling into his chest with a hammer drill. The criminals were scared off by relatives who came to the Kalugins, but they could not save the entrepreneur - he died in the hospital. As it turned out, this attack allowed the detectives to find the bandits.

The rest of the murders and robberies, as noted by the police, were “cleaner.” “The gang members spent a long time planning each crime, conducting surveillance on the victims, who were mostly entrepreneurs and lived in cottages. During the attacks, they tried not to leave biological material, removed their prints, and destroyed video surveillance recordings in the house. Sometimes they removed the corpses of victims from the crime scene. They didn’t even spare pregnant women - for example, they killed an entrepreneur and his wife, who was nine months pregnant,” noted a Kommersant interlocutor familiar with the investigation of the case, on condition of anonymity.

The defense of the accused could not be contacted yesterday. A Kommersant source in law enforcement agencies noted that they refuse to cooperate with the investigation.

Igor Lesovskikh

The bandits were found following signs of torture