Russia closes a black page: after 9 years, the “Volga Strangler” fell

A page in Russian black history was closed on Tuesday when police in Kazan, 720 kilometers from Moscow, arrested a man accused of kill dozens of women older for nine long years.

The “Strangler of the Volga”, as a local press had already called it, committed his crimes in the regions of European Russia, as well as in the provinces of the Volga and the Urals.

The detainee, a 38-year-old man named Radik Tagirov, he acted by deceiving his victims. He would show up to retirees’ apartments as a social worker or gas worker and, gaining their trust, he would wait for the right moment to strangle them with any utensil he had on hand, such as a robe belt or a cord. iron.

Kazan police chief Rustem Kadirov did not rule out that pretend to be a good samaritan and offered to carry the shopping bags to the old women.

The criminal’s goal was to remove the money from the house, as he said during questioning in which he confessed to his crimes.

According to a video released by the Russian Interior Ministry, the man explained that he committed his first crime because “I was hungry and I lived on the streets”. According to police records, Tagirov had spent time in prison for robbery.

“I picked them at random, saw them come out of the supermarkets and followed them (…) Sometimes they would invite me in and we would talk. Then I would suffocate them from behind until they were ‘falling asleep,’ he added according to what was said in the video, the content was published by CNN.

Several law enforcement bodies were behind this serial killer since 2011, when their macabre crimes began. Apparently most of them signed up between this year and the next.

In 2017, investigators offered a reward of three million rubles ($ 32,000) for a clue that could help identify him. His robot portrait was regularly published in the newspapers.

But when they didn’t find any concrete clues, they came to suspect that he was dead or that he had gone to jail for a minor crime. And is always performed with gloves and sprayed the floor with cleaning products the police dogs could not therefore find him.

This situation has changed with the intervention of the laboratory and the databases. And it is that DNA played a decisive role in the final arrest.

The one found at the scene of one of the crimes, committed in Kazan, capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, coincides with a DNA sample from the detainee, who had previously been prosecuted for theft and illegal possession of weapons.

The daily Kommersant gave him his first and last name yesterday. Apparently the murderer of old women is called Radik Taguírov, he lives in the Tatar capital and worked as a locksmith.

Investigators do not believe he acted alone in his town, but they attribute the murders of women to between 75 and 90 years old, in neighboring regions, such as Udmurtia and Bashkortostan, also on the Volga, or in the province of Perm, in the Urals and 500 kilometers from Kazan. According to investigators, he robbed and strangled at least 26 women.

With information from La Vanguardia