A young woman has described how she hid under a duvet as a drunken man shot dead her boyfriend and eight other people at a party with a hunting rifle.
The 21-year-old sole survivor, named Marina, said Sergei Yegorov calmly carried out the killings after an argument at a dacha, or country cottage, 80 miles northwest of Moscow. The 45-year-old electrician was arrested shortly afterwards and charged with murder. He is said to have confessed.
Police sources said he had got into a quarrel with a group of people who were enjoying a meal and drinks in the garden of the dacha near the small town of Redkino in the Tver region on Saturday evening. Some reports said Yegorov had taken umbrage after men in the group expressed doubt over his claims to have served in the army as a paratrooper.
A spokesman for the investigative committee, which looks into serious crimes, said the revellers had forcibly removed him from their property, “threatening reprisals if he showed his face there again”. Yegorov went home, collected his Saiga hunting rifle, returned to the scene at 3am and demanded an apology. When some of those at the gathering moved towards him, he shot them and then turned his gun on the others. Five men and four women were killed.
Among the dead was Marina’s boyfriend, Vyacheslav Savelev, himself a former paratrooper. She said they had been spending the evening with his grandmother and their friends.
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“A lunatic came and shot everyone. I had not seen him before but I saw how he killed people,” she said. Asked if Yegorov’s victims had tried to run away, she replied: “Yes, but it was hopeless. He was very serious about what he was doing. He either beat people with the barrel or shot them point blank.
“Half the people were outside, whom he killed straight away, the other half were inside. He came in and shot the couple [who owned the dacha], then a 92-year-old grandmother, a veteran of the war. I managed to hide under a duvet. I was just lucky, although he came in the room twice. He didn’t know I was there, he just looked to see if there was anyone.”
She added: “I saw, I heard, how he dragged the bodies from one place to another, I saw how he finished them off, how they all wheezed. I heard everything, how that piece of scum then washed his hands.” Footage from the scene showed blood-splashed paths in the garden and at least two bodies. Officers guarded Yegorov, handcuffed and dressed in a camouflage hoodie, as he knelt in the back of a police jeep.
The body of one of his victims, a woman, was found in the boot of a car. She was said to have been killed last after refusing to dig her own grave. Life, a news website close to the police and security services, said a canister of petrol and some newspaper had been found next to some of the bodies, suggesting he had planned to set them on fire.