MOSCOW, September 10 (RIA Novosti) – A Russian man who killed an 81-year-old woman to whom he owed money has been sentenced to 16 years in a penal colony, Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement on its website Tuesday.
Pavel Barabantsev, a 31-year-old resident of the village of Bele-Kushalskoye in the Tver Region about 180 km (110 miles) from Moscow, asked the elderly woman – who was not named in the statement – to whom he owed money to meet him in the village cemetery on October 29 last year, the committee said.
Armed with an unspecified object “possessing chopping properties,” Barabantsev attacked the woman when she arrived, dealing her at least eight blows to the head.
She died on the spot, after which Barabantsev stole her mobile phone, buried her body in the cemetery and fled the scene, investigators said in the statement.
Barabantsev pleaded guilty to murder motivated by financial gain, and was ordered to serve 16 years in a penal colony and pay a fine of 511,600 rubles ($15,468).
Media organizations had dubbed Barabantsev the “Raskolnikov of Tver,” after the fictional main character in Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” In the novel, Raskolnikov, a destitute ex-student in St. Petersburg, murders an elderly female pawnbroker with an axe for her money.
