Grandmother strangles and stabs her grandchildren to death ‘insinuating they were possessed by demons’
A grandmother strangled and stabbed her grandchildren because she thought they were possessed by demons.
Svetlana Muradyan, 42, and her lover were taking care of her
grandchildren Vladislav Eliseev, 5, and his sister Esenia, 3, at their
home in the Belgorod region of Russia. The adults, who were drinking,
began hallucinating and thought they saw evil spirits in the children.
As a result of what they were seeing, they strangled the boy with an electric cord and stabbed the girl to death.
An investigator who was not named said both the adults “saw demons in the children”.
After the attack, Muradyan called for help from a neighbour’s son, a doctor.
The doctor said that when he arrived the boy was already dead and the
girl was wheezing. He called an ambulance and the police, but the girl
later died in hospital.
The grandmother was ruled to be “sane” and was sentenced by a Russian
court to 16 years in jail. According to Mirror, the judge found that
the grandmother’s lover – named only as Yury – was unaware of his
actions during the murder due to a “temporary mental disorder” brought
on by “alcoholism”. This condition “deprived him of the ability to recognize the danger of his actions and to control them”, said a court
statement.
The grandmother’s lover was sentenced to compulsory psychiatric treatment.
The children’s “distraught” parents Natalia and Alexander split up
after the murder of their son and daughter in January last year, said
reports.