A top-secret missile plant worker has been jailed for life for the double murder of a VIP banker and her friend as they ate pizza at a Russian beauty spot.
Alexey Alexandrov, 35, was detained after a massive police search by police in which 4,500 people were questioned over the random shootings of Ksenia Soltanova and Natalia Kuznetsova in 2018.
The married father-of-one said the random murders were to avenge his childhood bullying, and coldly admitted to detectives in a chilling video confession: ‘My purpose was to kill.’
Alexey Alexandrov has been jailed for life for the double murder of a VIP banker and her friend as they ate pizza at a Russian beauty spot
More than 4,500 people were questioned over the random shootings of Ksenia Soltanova (left) and Natalia Kuznetsova (right) in 2018
He denied any sexual motive, but said he killed them because of the alleged abuse he faced at school and college, even though he had never met his victims and they had nothing to do with the bullying when he was a child two decades earlier.
Banker Ksenia, 29, and Natalia, 28, were enjoying a late picnic at picturesque Mount Uktus near Yekaterinburg when he used night vision to track and shoot them each three times.
Alexandrov, a design specialist at a defence factory making advanced missile systems for the S-300 and BUK-M1, then put on medical gloves and dragged them fatally wounded into long grass.
The married father-of-one, pictured playing with a gun with his wife in a forest, has confessed to the killings
He works as a design specialist at a defence factory making advanced missile systems for the S-300 and BUK-M1
The pair intended to watch the dawn rise but sinister amateur photographer Alexandrov shot them with his 6.35-caliber air rifle in August 2018.
‘They were eating pizza,’ he said.
Alexandrov, ‘happily married’ with a three-year-old son, worked at Kalinin Machine-Building Plant, which makes Russian anti-aircraft missile systems.
A picture shows the ‘cold-blooded killer’ and his wife Yulia, 33, playing with a gun in a forest.
Ksenia (pictured) worked with VIP customers for Russia’s largest financial institution Sberbank
Tatyana Kuznetsova, mother of Natalia (pictured), had appealed in a phone in to Vladimir Putin for action from law enforcement to find the killer
The pair intended to watch the sunrise at a popular beauty spot near a forest in Mount Uktus
She was unaware that he secretly drew up a ‘retribution programme’ two decades ago to counter the bullying he faced, he told police.
He had planned four killings but ‘after committing this double murder…I could not sleep at night’ and he abandoned his intention to shoot two more people.
‘I realised I was wrong. I had to forgive my (bullies).’
The killer was only brought to justice after a high profile campaign by the mothers of the two victims demanding action from state investigators to solve the murders.
Ksenia (left) and Natalia (right) were enjoying a late picnic at picturesque Mount Uktus near Yekaterinburg when he used night vision to track and shoot them each three times
Alexandrov (pictured crying in court), is ‘happily married’ with a three-year-old son and worked at Kalinin Machine-Building Plant, which makes Russian anti-aircraft missile systems
Tatyana Kuznetsova, mother of Natalia, had appealed in a phone in to Vladimir Putin for action from law enforcement to find the killer, and now she is demanding a return of the death penalty.
She said Alexandrov ‘killed and abandoned them like dogs’, saying: ‘My daughter lived for a week after she was shot, he made porridge of her brains. As the doctor told us, it was like mincemeat.
‘Why did he curse us like that? In one second, he completely destroyed two families.’
Alina Soltanova, mother of Ksenia, who worked with VIP customers for Russia’s largest financial institution Sberbank, said: ‘We will do everything so that he gets a full life sentence.
Alina Soltanova (pictured), mother of Ksenia, said: ‘We will do everything so that he gets a full life sentence’
‘His child is growing up, and he will find that his dad killed two defenceless women.
‘But what for? I don’t understand.
‘He just came up behind them, shot, and went home calmly to bed.’
Despite his confession, Alexandrov’s lawyer Danil Zadorin claimed his client had been framed and will now appeal.
‘There is no DNA of Alexandrov, he was not identified on the recordings from CCTV cameras. The rifle from which the shots were fired was never found,’ he said.
Father of the killer Alexander Mogilnikov said he sympathised with the grieving mothers while claiming his son was not the killer.
‘I understand their condition. But listening to this in relation to my son, of course, is unpleasant for me,’ he said.
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