Cannibalism news – the 2024 round-up

On 02/01/202502/01/2025 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News1 Comment

‘There will be cannibalism, and rumours of cannibalism”

Yes, I paraphrased the Book of Matthew. Although not all that many people got eaten, the media was full of cannibal stories, and here are a few of them, sorted by their places of occurrence.

Australia

One of the men imprisoned for the so-called Snowtown murders (which mostly did not take place in the little town of Snowtown) was released. Mark Haydon was charged with assisting the men who did the actual killing and who ate part of one victim’s leg some 25 years earlier.

Brazil

Influencer Israel dos Santos Assis, better known online as Pinguim (Penguin) was arrested for desecrating graves in the cemetery of San Francisco the Count in the Salvador Metropolitan Region, stealing human bones, and using human flesh from the corpses to cook his most popular dish: feijoada, a bean stew usually involved simmering beans with beef or pork. Seems rotting human is a good substitute for pork.

Canada

Robert Pickton, the pig farmer convicted of six counts of second-degree murder (although he was charged with at least twenty others), was attacked by another inmate in prison and died a few weeks later. Pickton allegedly “processed” the meat of his rape and murder victims by feeding them to his pigs and, police said, possibly mixing them up with pork products he sold to his neighbours for their personal consumption.

China

Netflix released a new version of the classic science fiction book 3 Body Problem and ran into a storm of criticism from China for its depictions of the extreme violence of the Cultural Revolution. Although most of the victims of the purges were killed by shooting, live burial, drowning, boiling alive, and disembowelling, there is evidence that several hundred had been cannibalised, as the ultimate in humiliation.

The General who presided over a Cultural Revolution massacre that included cannibalism of those deemed “enemies of the people”, Wei Guoqing, was reburied (or at least his ashes were) with full honours in Beijing’s Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery – the resting place of China’s high-ranking leaders and revolutionary heroes. Wei’s name is most strongly linked in the public mind with cannibalism during the massacre period in Guangxi’s Wuxuan and Wuming counties and Nanning city. Researchers have found that at least 137 people were eaten, with thousands participating. “Paying tribute to a legendary gourmet,” wrote one wag on social media.

Cuba

Stories began circulating this year that the extreme food shortages in Cuba were leading to the danger, or actual occurrence, of cannibalism. This was bolstered by reports from 2022 of two hospital workers who had been stealing hearts and fat from human bodies and selling them as mince.

Haiti

Rumours circulated that the natural disasters and gang violence in Haiti was leading to starvation cannibalism. Jimmy Cherizier, a gang leader called Barbecue (“Babekyou” in the local parlance) was known for his penchant for burning people alive, and there was at least one video on Twitter/X of one gang member supposedly “tearing flesh from the leg of a burning corpse and eating it.” Such stories cannot be selfishly maintained by one little country, so of course it was not long before Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused of joining the cannibal feast. To add to the hilarity, Elon Musk posted on his own site, X, that a picture of a man near a fire was evidence of cannibalism, only to have the post removed by his own team for violating community standards. The fact-checking website Snopes pointed out that videos of bodies in Haiti being roasted on spits had previously appeared as accusations against a Nigerian restaurant, and were in fact from a Halloween prank in China in 2018. Still, you know, voodoo and all. Meanwhile, Trump ally Laura Loomer supplied conclusive proof that Haitians were cannibals: apparently, if you Google it, you will see a lot of results. The Prosecution rests its case.

India

India’s top court put a temporary stay on the execution of a man convicted of killing his mother and eating her remains in what is being deemed as the “rarest of rare” cases of cannibalism. Sunil Rama Kuchkoravi of western Maharashtra state’s Kolhapur district was handed a death penalty by a lower court in 2021 for killing his 63-year-old mother in 2017. The High Court in October this year upheld the death sentence against Kuchkoravi, stating that the convict possibly has a “syndrome of pathological cannibalism”. The execution has been delayed until the case is reheard in April 2025.

Israel (and around there)

Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for Palestinian rights, has been condemned for antisemitic rhetoric by the governments of the U.S., France and Germany among others. Albanese, known for accusing Israel of genocide (an odd charge seeing that the population of Gaza has increased in the last twelve months), wrote that the Israeli army was “rotten to the core”. A follower immediately introduced the classic blood libel: “Jews are capable of eating human flesh”, to which Albanese replied along the lines of “not all Jews”. Reassuring to note that a person paid by the taxpayers of the West, who finance the UN, can admit that some Jews are not cannibals!

A Yazidi woman was rescued from Gaza by Israeli troops. She revealed that, after being captured by ISIS in 2014 and forced to be sex slaves, the women were starved and finally fed meat which, they later told her, was from the bodies of a beheaded Yazidi baby, the child of one of the women. They told her:

‘We cooked your one-year-old son that we took from you, and this is what you just ate’.

Indonesia

Police investigated a suspected cannibalism case in West Java Province. The Head of the Criminal Investigation Unit confirmed that a video on social media showed the alleged perpetrator consuming a small portion of the victim’s flesh. He said that police had found 12 body parts of the victim at the crime scene.

Italy

An inmate in the notorious Poggioreale Prison in Naples tore the finger off another inmate and ate it. The Campania Guarantor, Samuele Ciambriello, observed that “it is now clear that the Poggioreale prison needs a structure suitable for hosting inmates suffering from mental disorders.” Seems like a good idea.

Mexico

A podcast called Mexico Unexplained revisited this year the story of Gabriela Rico Jiménez, a 21-year-old model from Mexico who disappeared some 15 years ago, after raging against the machine outside a fancy hotel in Monterrey Nuevo Leon. Ranting about the elites, including oddly the Queens of England and Germany (which is a Republic), she had shouted that “They ate humans! Disgusting!… They smell like human flesh!”

Nigeria

A man accused of being a sorcerer was blamed by villagers of the small town of Kirikiri for the disappearance of several children and elderly people. He was supposed to be “feeding on the flesh of the innocent.” Several claimed to have located the individual on the edge of a forest, wearing clothes “stained with blood” and mumbling mysterious incantations. A group of villagers beat the man and left him for dead.

Russia

Erkinzhon Abdurakhmanov, 47, intended to cure his own heart problems ‘after making a pact with the devil’, he told police. He killed a 65-year-old male pensioner in the Kuyurgazinsky district of Russian region Bashkortostan by striking him three times with an axe, according to reports. He then then cut out the heart and ‘ate the meal’ as he waited at a bus stop. He gave the uneaten remains to a woman also waiting for a bus ‘and asked her to bury it’. He was not arrested, however, until he headed into a liquor store and tried to steal some drinks. Cannibalism is not against the law in Russia, but murder and stealing alcohol is.

Vladimar Putin’s policy of giving pardons to criminals who agreed to fight in Ukraine in lieu of serving their sentences, was honoured in a pardon to a charmer named Denis Gorin, who had been convicted of at least four murders, and had eaten the flesh of his victims.

Another pardon involved Dmitri Malyshev. Malyshev was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2015 for multiple criminal offences. Ten years ago, he murdered an acquaintance, a Tajik native, and then filmed himself cutting the heart out of the victim and roasting it in a frying pan and eating it. Neighbours seemed uneasy about his imminent return home.

South Africa

On December 26, 2024, eight illegal miners known as zama zamas emerged from Shaft 10 of a mine near Stilfontein, located in Northwest South Africa. They were taken by police, who confirmed that twelve bodies remained trapped beneath the ground, with miners reportedly resorting to eating human flesh due to severe food shortages.

[GRAPHIC CONTENT] Illegal miners have started eating human flesh. That's according to SANCO North West Spokesperson, Mzukisi Jam. The claims were made in Christmas Eve letters sent to the surface claiming that more miners have died. #DStv403 #eNCA pic.twitter.com/vqDodTXgmZ
— eNCA (@eNCA) December 25, 2024

Ukraine

Novosibirsk Archpriest Alexander Novopashin became notorious for claiming that Ukrainians are “cannibals”. Although conspiracy theories about cannibals are becoming more common, this particular Archpriest is taken seriously in Russia, and regularly lectures Russian security forces and soldiers.

UK

Marius Gustavson, who called himself “the eunuch maker”, offered a service where he charged men to destroy or remove their testicles, and then charged subscribers to his website to see him perform the operations. The court heard that that there was “clear evidence” of cannibalism and that Gustavson had “cooked testicles for lunch in an artfully arranged salad platter”.

Meanwhile, a candidate from a party called Reform UK was suspended for saying that meat-eaters should “eat other humans” and said humanity should be “obliterated”. Just saying what many are thinking, perhaps.

USA

The cannibal story of the year was the President, Joe Biden, claiming that his uncle had been eaten by cannibals in New Guinea. The leaders of PNG took exception to the stereotyping of their people as cannibals. Apparently, only some of them had been.

Speaking of Presidents, Donald Trump embellished his rhetoric on immigration by pointing out that some of the undocumented people pouring over the border were from insane asylums, and called that “Silence of the Lambs stuff”. Trump had previously claimed that Hannibal Lecter had endorsed his candidacy, which is a bit odd since Hannibal is a fictional character, but by far not the oddest claim in the 2024 election.

In March, a homeless man in Kern County was arrested for picking up the leg of a person who had been killed in a train accident and chowing down on it. California has no laws against cannibalism, but he was charged with “mutilating the body” which is a bit odd, since the train had already done that.

In Utah, which also has no law against cannibalism (Idaho is the only state that does), a law was passed to criminalise the ‘ritual abuse of a child’, which apparently regularly includes making the little ones eat “organic substance or material” (i.e. bits of people) before they are allowed to have their desserts. This in addition to claims that such rituals would sometimes involve eating the children instead.

A keen-eyed traveller pointed out that the road once taken by the Donner Party, which ended up in them getting lost and eating each other, was now signposted with a sign indicating dining was available. Much hilarity ensued on social media.

Conservative political commentator Candace Owens managed to link transexuals, Native Americans and cannibals, all in one sentence. No wonder she is so widely admired.

Much to the relief of the good people of Idaho (the only State in the Union with laws against cannibalism), the law was amended to ensure that giving someone else human flesh to eat was also prohibited. This led, on its long road to farce, to the accusation that bodies were being turned into compost which could be used to grow food for humans to consume. Rather than DNA test all compost, the law confined itself to banning the act of deliberately giving human flesh to another person. The legislator who introduced the bill cited a disturbing case on the show TruTV, which she admitted might have been a prank (it was) in which diners were told they had been eating human flesh, just to whet their appetites perhaps.

Ariana Grande raised some eyebrows when she was asked on a podcast whom she would most like to dine, and named Jeffrey Dahmer. Not sure Dahmer would have agreed – he was more into man-flesh, and there’s not much meat on Ariana anyway.

In April, a man was arrested in Las Vegas for eating a victim’s eyeballs and ears. The victim was pronounced dead. What happens in Vegas stays – internal.

Talking of ears, Mike Tyson, famous for biting the ear of Evander Holyfield in a fight in (where else) las Vegas in 1997, released a line of marijuana gummies shaped like nibbled ears.

Allegations were raised that Gilgo Beach ‘serial killer’ Rex Heuermann’s family was involved in the murders, which took place near the remote beach town of Gilgo in Suffolk County, New York from the 1990s to 2011. His daughter, who likes to paint the odd Satanic scene including body parts and cannibal feasts, was accused of being involved in his depredations. Homicide experts said that was insane, a word that gets tossed around a lot in cannibal stories. Heuermann was charged with a seventh murder last week.

On October 9, a woman in Kentucky, Torilena May Fields, was arrested after a dismembered body was found behind a home in Northern Kentucky and cooked human body parts were found in the oven. The body, and its parts, turned out to have been her mother. She was also charged with cruelty in that she “intentionally tortured and killed a domestic dog.”. A contractor found the dismembered body of the mother, and told police the perp had been “casting spells.” Her bail was set at $1.5 million. Her next court appearance is set for March 10, 2025 in Robertson County.
Some people just give cannibalism a bad name.

Another Kentucky woman, a former youth counsellor, was arrested for allegedly discussing cannibalism and other hobbies with a convicted murderer.

In Oklahoma, Kevin Ray Underwood was executed by lethal injection in December (on his 45^th birthday, the press gleefully informed us) for killing a ten-year-old girl in a “cannibalistic fantasy.” The man admitted to luring the girl into his apartment and beating her over the head with a cutting board before suffocating and sexually assaulting her. He told investigators that he nearly beheaded her in his bathtub before abandoning his plans to eat her. So not really a cannibalism story, but near enough.

International

Citizen of the world, Donald Duck, appeared on the interview show Hot Ones on the Internet (which is global), where guests eat chicken wings with hot sauce. Turns out Donald is a vegan though, preferring cauliflower, and since ducks aren’t chickens, the controversy that ensued over whether he was (or would have been) a cannibal by partaking of chicken was just silly.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, and may your worst problems be mild gastro-oesophageal reflux.

And don’t forget to go to the dentist.

Cannibalism News 2024: Putin pardons more cannibals

On 21/01/202421/01/2024 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News2 Comments

Another Russian convicted of murder and cannibalism has been pardoned by Vladimir Putin after fighting in the Ukraine.

Denis Gorin (Денис Горин), from the city of Aniva, Sakhalin region, was recruited into a private military company after signing a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defence. He is known to have been convicted three times for murdering at least four people between 2003 and 2022. He and his brother were also convicted of eating the remains of his victims. Gorin killed his victims, then washed and refrigerated the remains. After his last conviction in 2018, Gorin was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

However, at least seventeen convicted murderers have been pardoned by the Russian President since 2022 for agreeing to serve in the war on Ukraine. A neighbour of Gorin, Dmitry Vladimirovich, said that Gorin was now free and had been admitted to a military hospital in the eastern Russian city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk due to a moderate injury. The neighbour added that the victims’ relatives are likely to arrange a lynching.

“He’s basically free, pardoned, and half his sentence has been wiped out. But I don’t think he’ll stay free for long. His victims’ relatives remember everything.”

The first murder was in 2003.

“At the trial, he admitted that they ate the murdered man; he was their acquaintance. They killed him because they were drunk, and then the elder brother, Evgeniy (he had already tasted human flesh by that time), tried to force his wife to eat it. Then – his younger brother, Denis. According to Denis, he refused, but his brother threatened to kill him too. Then he started eating.”

After that first murder, Gorin was sentenced to ten years imprisonment, but released after seven years due to “exemplary behaviour”. Gorin returned to Aniva where he stabbed to death the brother of another prisoner with whom he was in the pre-trial detention centre. After the murder, according to the case file, he “decided to remember the past, namely, to cut off the meat from [the victim] and subsequently eat it.”

In 2011, Denis Gorin and his brother killed a man and hid his body on the banks of the Lyutoga River, and at the beginning of 2012 they committed another murder, according to the regional prosecutor’s office. This was proven five years later. In 2018, the court sentenced Denis Gorin to 22 years of imprisonment in a special regime colony for the last three murders. The neighbour reported that:

“This came up by chance; they also tried to kill one local while they were drunk, but they couldn’t. When they were detained, (I was present), they opened the refrigerator, and it was filled to the brim with human meat! He told us right there how he cut meat from the legs of the dead, looked at the biceps to see if there was meat there. They showed the hole where the remains were buried – there were 12 people there. Not three, as stated in the verdict! And among the skeletons there was a very small one – some girl was killed. But we couldn’t prove it in court.”

In 2023, Putin pardoned him. Pro-Kremlin media has ignored the news of the cannibal’s pardon. Nevertheless, it appears sporadically on social networks and instant messengers.

“Maniacs are real. His brother was killed while still in prison, and this brother didn’t even serve five years, but is already free. Maybe he’ll be patient for a year, and then he’ll start killing again.”

A photo on Gorin’s social media profile on Odnoklassniki – a Russian social media platform shows him wearing a military uniform with the letter Z emblazoned on the sleeve, a pro-war symbol for conflicts in Ukraine and abroad widely used in Russia.

Another man, Nikolai Ogolobyak, a self-confessed Satanist, was convicted of ritual murders, and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2019 for murdering four teenagers and then consuming their remains. The 33-year-old man was reportedly pardoned by the Russian president for fighting in Ukraine.

This blog reported on another jailed cannibal, Yegor Komarov, who was purportedly released to fight in Ukraine in 2022.

Russia’s Defence Ministry and the Wagner mercenary group have recruited heavily from Russian prisons to the notorious “Storm Z” unit of convicts, to bolster their manpower in Ukraine, promising convicts a pardon in exchange for military service. Several of these pardoned convicts have reportedly committed new crimes after returning from Ukraine. And returned soldiers do tend to come home undernourished and voraciously hungry.

Satanist cannibal released after fighting in Ukraine

On 07/12/202307/12/2023 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News2 Comments

The Moscow Times has reported that a self-confessed member of a Satanist sect, who was serving a twenty-year prison sentence for murder and the desecration of dead bodies, has been freed after completing six months of military service in Ukraine.

Nikolai Ogolobyak and other Satan worshippers, including one nicknamed “Hitler,” beheaded two of their four victims — then removed their hearts and tongues, fried and ate them.

In a second case in which they killed two other people, Ogolobyak made 666 stabs on his victim as an apparent reference to the ‘number of the beast’, a symbol of the devil.

Ogolobyak, 33, from the Yaroslavl region, was released earlier this month after he was severely injured in battle, his father said. His prison sentence had been set to end in 2030. His father told the press:

“He is not working. He is recovering. It is unlikely that he will be taken to the ‘special military operation’ again.”

Ogolobyak and his underage accomplices were sentenced in 2010 for killing four teenagers and desecrating their bodies in 2008 initiation rituals. Another suspect, Anton Makovkin, was ruled insane and was placed in a mental institution. The ritualistic murders rocked the Yaroslavl region — where the then-teenage Ogolbyak was known as “Count.”

Other members included Alexei “Dead” Chistyakov; Anton “Doctor Goth” Makovkin; Sergey “Distris” Karpenko, and Alexander “Hitler” Voronov”.

For the first two years, the teen Satanist carried out bloody rituals by sacrificing stray dogs and cats. Initially, new members were inducted into the cult using the blood of slaughtered animals, which were tied to an upside-down cross.

But in the summer of 2008, the Satanists went out hunting for people to sacrifice — and wound up killing and dismembering four college students they had befriended: Olga Pukhova, Anna Gorokhova, Andrej Sorokin and Varya Kuzmina.

On June 28, 2008, after a night of drinking, Pukhova and Gorokhova were lured to a clearing, where the cult members started a bonfire and positioned themselves in a pentagram formation, according to documents filed in the case.

When one of them gave a sign, all the suspects fell upon the two young women and plunged daggers into their bodies. Makovkin then decapitated the girls with a sword, after which the mutilated corpses were dismembered and carved up, and several internal organs were fried and eaten, according to the court records.

The newest member of the group, Ksenia “Kara” Kovaleva, was bathed in the victims’ blood as part of her initiation ceremony. One of the suspects was known in the group as “the secretary from hell” who took notes in a book of made from the skin of the victims.

According to leading prisoner’s rights activist Olga Romanova, around 80,000 convicts were recruited from Russian prisons, and 20-30,000 have already returned to civilian life. The Kremlin has reiterated that they will keep the pardoning practice active for the foreseeable future.

Dmitri Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, defended these pardons, believing that “people convicted, including for serious crimes, atone for their crime with blood on the battlefield.”

This blog reported on another jailed cannibal, Yegor Komarov, who was purportedly released to fight in Ukraine in 2022. It now appears that the cannibal sent to fight in the Ukraine may actually have been Ogolobyak.

The Times reports that Russians are increasingly uneasy about the release of killers on the basis that they served in the army. Particularly, one must assume, cannibal Satanists.

Criminals becoming “real cannibals” in Ukraine?

On 05/02/202304/02/2023 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News1 Comment

In October 2022, thecannibalguy blog reported on the news that Russia has been boosting the number of soldiers fighting in Ukraine by recruiting within its worst maximum-security prisons, including enlisting a convicted cannibal.

The cannibal, Yegor Komarov, had been the subject of an earlier blog in December 2021. He had been arrested for murder in the town of Sortavala (near the Finnish border) after a headless body fell from his car. Komarov admitted to being a cannibal and confessed to stabbing and killing another man in a St Petersburg park the previous year for the sole purpose of tasting human flesh, adding that he had sliced off the victim’s tongue and fried it in butter.

The recruiters of this motley army of murderers, rapists (and at least one cannibal), all of who are promised freedom if they survive six months of war, is a mercenary force called The Wagner Group. It had first been deployed to the Ukraine back in 2014 to help pro-Russian separatists battle Ukrainian forces.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” because he rose from being a restaurateur and caterer for the Kremlin, is the leader of the Wagner Group. Many of Mr Prigozhin’s companies are currently under US sanctions for what it calls his “malign political and economic influence around the globe”.

Prigozhin originally denied any connection with the Wagner Group, but now a new video has surfaced (at the top of this page) where he shows how his mercenaries are trained before being sent in as the shock troops of the Russian war to occupy Ukraine.

In the video, Prigozhin speaks about so-called “elite” fighters from a special training base in the village of Molkino in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia:

This is a supplementary training base for our fighters…. Here experienced fighters are given additional training in their specialties. So they raise young eagles there, and here they make real cannibals.

These prisoners from the worst Russian prisons are considered disposable, sent into the front lines in Ukraine as cannon fodder. According to the Ukrainian President, after the fighting around the Soledar salt mines in January 2023,

“Thousands of their people were lost: the whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes. This is what madness looks like.”

Commanders of the brutal mercenary group are reportedly castrating their own soldiers who try to surrender or retreat. In an intercepted call in December 2022, US intelligence said that they learned a member of the Wagner Group was castrated for either trying to retreat or surrender. The intercepted call heard a Russian soldier say, “The Wagnerians caught him and cut his fucking balls off” but the video tape was not released.

We have no reports yet about the fate of the recruited cannibal, Yegor Komarov, nor do we know if he is finding ‘gainful’ employment teaching other recruits how to be “real cannibals”.

We do know that cannibalism is a recurring event in Russian and Ukrainian history, particularly in the last hundred years. Russia’s worst serial killer was a cannibal named Andrei Chikatilo, who was convicted of killing fifty-two women and children between 1978 and 1990, although he had confessed to many more. Chikatilo blamed his cannibalism fetish on the story his mother had told him about his brother being taken and eaten by the neighbours in the 1930s, during the Holodomor.

The “Holodomor” (literally “murder by starvation”) was an event that took place in the Ukraine in 1932-3, during which the population was deliberately decimated by Stalin’s collectivisation of the farms and seizure of food stores. As starvation set in, corpses began to disappear, and the government response was simply to put up signs saying, “Eating dead children is barbarism”.

Not so in war, apparently. What exactly Yevgeny Prigozhin meant by turning his soldiers into “real cannibals” is not clear. But in view of his total disregard for their welfare, we have to wonder how well Prigozhin feeds his soldiers. Or, as Putin’s chef, does he simply give them a recipe book?

PUTIN SENDS A CANNIBAL TO FIGHT IN UKRAINE

On 02/10/202206/10/2022 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News5 Comments

The war in the Ukraine has been one of the dominant news stories of 2022. At the time of the invasion in February 2022, Russia, a supposed military superpower, was expected to crush the much smaller Ukrainian military and swallow up the country in a matter of days. Cannibalise it, one might say.

However, the reality, after months of fighting, was that Russia did not achieve a quick victory, and might not even keep the territory it has taken. In the meantime, both sides have suffered significant losses of fighters, equipment and infrastructure. The Ukrainians estimated in mid-September that over 50,000 Russian soldiers have been killed so far.

The news this month (September 2022) is that Russia has mobilised around 300,000 “reservists” – civilians who have completed their mandatory military service, but will now be dragged back into uniform. There are two million reservists in Russia, so this is only a partial mobilisation, but it shows a level of desperation in Putin’s war machine.

But it turns out that Russia has been boosting the number of soldiers for some time, by recruiting within its worst maximum-security prisons.

A mercenary army called The Wagner Group deployed to the Ukraine back in 2014 to help pro-Russian separatists fight Ukrainian forces. British military intelligence reports that there are 1,000 mercenaries fighting there. The group has also been active in Syria and Africa, and has repeatedly been accused of war crimes and human rights abuses. They are now fighting alongside Russian regular troops in the Donbas region.

A BBC investigation identified Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” – so-called because he rose from being a restaurateur and caterer for the Kremlin – as a key figure in the Wagner Group. Many of Mr Prigozhin’s companies are currently under US sanctions for what it calls his “malign political and economic influence around the globe”. He has denied any connection with the Wagner Group.

Now a leading expert in Russia’s prison system, Olga Romanova, in the media group “Vazhnye istorii” (Важные истории or Important Stories) has reported that prisoners from the jails around St. Petersburg are being recruited to go to war in Ukraine as part of the “Wagner” army. Romanova states that Prigozhin has been visiting Russian prison camps in order to enlist convicted criminals to fight in Ukraine, according to accounts from military analysts and videos that have emerged on Telegram from Russian prisons. Romanova told The Daily Beast website:

“Putin’s plan is to recruit at least 50,000 convicts and Prigozhin, who is an ex-convict himself, has already sent more than 3,000 [including] serial murderers, robbers and at least one cannibal.”

Relatives of the prisoners report that the inmates are being promised that if the “volunteer” dies, they will pay the family 5 million roubles. If they live for six months of “service”, they will receive a payment of 200,000 roubles and a full pardon. A chilling thought for the victims (and their relatives) of the crimes which caused them to be in the prison camps!

“In 1/2 a year you go home with a pardon… there’s no way you end up back in prison. Those who arrive on the first day and don’t like where they’ve ended up are considered deserters and get shot.”

In Ukraine, Prigozin’s army is often referred to as an “army of orcs and goblins,” a reference to Lord of the Rings. “They take everyone, no matter what they are in prison for,” said Romanova in a video on the “Popular Politics” YouTube channel, as translated by The New Voice of Ukraine.

“They took a maniac who, so to speak, has cannibalism in his portfolio. He was also sent to war.”

Now authoritative sources (Twitter) tells us that the cannibal who has been recruited by the Wagner Group for the war in Ukraine is none other than Yegor Komarov, about whom this blog reported in December 2021. Komarov had been arrested in the town of Sortavala (near the Finnish border) after running from his crashed car, from the boot of which had tumbled a headless corpse. Komarov admitted to being a cannibal and stated that he ‘likes killing people’. He confessed to stabbing and killing another man in a park in St Petersburg the previous year for the sole purpose of tasting human flesh, and said he had sliced off the tongue and fried it in butter.

He sounds like a perfect guest at a dinner party for Putin, catered of course by Prigozhin, “Putin’s chef”.

Cannibalism in the Ukraine: GHOUL (Petr Jákl, 2015)

On 28/08/202227/08/2022 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films2 Comments

Ghoul is a “found footage” movie, a postmodern affectation that pretends it is a documentary that has been ‘found’ after some gruesome disaster. The genre was popularised (although not originated) by the Blair Witch Project in 1999 which, like Ghoul, had young film-makers heading off to investigate the paranormal, and wishing they hadn’t. One of its most famous antecedents was Cannibal Holocaust in 1980, which was purportedly a documentary about missing documentary makers, and was (purportedly) believable enough to lead to a court case in which the actors had to be produced to prove they had not in fact been killed in some sort of snuff movie. This was of course great publicity for the film, as was the fact that it had been banned in several jurisdictions. The very first film in the genre was probably Punishment Park in 1971, in which anti-Vietnam War demonstrators are supposedly dropped in the desert and hunted by Nixon’s cops.

The main point of interest in this film (the found footage itself being unoriginal and totally preposterous) is the fact that it is set in The Ukraine which, at the time of writing, is again suffering from decisions taken in Moscow. The “Holodomor” (literally “murder by starvation”) was an event that took place in the Ukraine in 1932-3, during which the population was deliberately decimated by the collectivisation of the farms and seizure of food stores. As starvation set in, corpses began to disappear, and the government response was simply to put up signs saying, “Eating dead children is barbarism”. Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, the history of Nazi and Soviet mass murders between the wars, examines the incidents of cannibalism in the Ukraine and Poland, and concludes “With starvation will come cannibalism”. When there is no bread or other meat, human flesh becomes the currency. Snyder describes several reports, including an orphanage in Kharkiv where the older children began eating the youngest, who himself joined in, “tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could.”

Pretty difficult to invent a story worse than such a reality. So to add some spice, we have in Ghoul an amateur film crew from America who are fascinated by cannibalism (as, apparently, are very many people: this blog is currently receiving over 10,000 views per month – THANK YOU for reading!) They are researching evidence of cannibalism during the Holodomor, as part of a planned television series on cannibals of the twentieth century. They are conducting interviews in Kyiv of elderly survivors of that time, but they are also hoping to interview a man named Boris who was arrested rather more recently for eating a colleague, confessed to the crime under hypnosis, but then was released, as the body was never found. He said that he was made to do it. By whom, they wonder.

The crew are taken to a local psychic/witch, who tells them that paranormal entities were behind that murder. The crew dismisses this as superstition, getting drunk and getting her to perform a séance involving a pentagram, in which they mockingly summon the ghost of Andrei Chikatilo, a notorious serial killer and cannibal who killed and partially consumed dozens of women and children in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The next morning is full of strange and uncanny events, but the crew are unable to leave for help. The Ukrainian psychic tries but fails to evict Chikatilo’s presence, with no luck: he’s back now, and killing again. The idea is that Chikatilo forced Boris, their reluctant interviewee, to kill and eat his victim. He possesses (as in takes over the body of) a cat, then Boris, who proceeds to chase the young filmmakers, screaming, through various dark, gothic passages.

WTF? (Or що за біса as they say in The Ukraine). The film’s poster (below) says “INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS”. But where is the connection between Stalin’s attempted genocide in the 1930s and the ghost of a cannibal who had been active in Russia in the 1970s and 80s and was executed by a bullet behind his ear in 1994? Well, turns out Chikatilo had a brother that disappeared during the famine, and his ever-loving mummy told him the brother had been kidnapped and eaten. This may have just been to make him behave better (spoiler: didn’t work very well). So anyway, he decided to become a cannibal, specialising in small children. A real piece of work, and not one you’d want to reawaken from the dead.

I find hand-held filming annoying even in the hands of an expert, and this lot are supposed to be a bit sloppy, so the picture is jumping all over the place, to the point of seasickness. Reminds me of my dad’s Super-8 home movies (although he didn’t have a cannibal ghost to film, just bored kids). If you are patient enough to put up with the soundtrack (annoying bangs meant to scare you) and the shaky camera, the concept of a massacre being presented through the dispassionate eye of a video camera is interesting, in that it could be interpreted as the way the universe indifferently watches the suffering of its animals as they eat each other or, more immediately, the way the world watches as Russia tries to cannibalise Ukraine.

But besides the irritating camera work and the noisy things that go bump in the night, the plot is absurd – you have a historical tragedy, an imaginary murderer and the supposed ghost of a real murderer, who is somehow able to take over cats, people (including during sex) and of course kill people. The whole thing is frankly a bit of a yawn. It somehow managed to get to 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the LA Times critic summing it up well:

“Ghoul” can’t decide whether it should be about cannibals, serial killers, ghosts or demons. The found footage trivializes rather than reflects the horrific events that serve as the film’s basis.

According to IMDB, Ghoul was the highest grossing horror in Czech history. It also won the Vicious Cat Award at the Grossmann film and wine festival. Not sure if that will impress you or not.

The full movie was available on YouTube last time I checked, but all the dialog is in Czech and Ukrainian. Even if you speak both fluently, I wouldn’t bother.

Cannibal news: Russia, 2021, “I fried it in butter”

On 05/12/202104/12/2021 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News5 Comments

Russia is a big place, and has a population of around 144 million, so we could expect some cannibal news to come out of there. But two stories in one month is a new record.

Last week’s story concerned Vladimir Yadne who ate three people in Gaz-Sale in northern Russia, up near the Arctic Circle. This new case is 4,300 km (2,700 miles) west, near the border with Finland.

A suspect identified as Yegor Komarov, 23, has been arrested in Sortavala, Northern Russia, following a car accident on November 22, 2021, in which he crashed into a road safety barrier and a headless body fell out of his car boot, according to the news agency Tass.

Komarov and two other men fled into a nearby forest after the crash, leaving behind spades, ropes and sacks in the car boot.

After he was apprehended, Komarov admitted to being a cannibal and stated that he ‘likes killing people’. He confessed to stabbing and killing another man in a park in Sosnovka Park St Petersburg last year for the sole purpose of tasting human flesh, and said he had sliced off the tongue and fried it in butter before disposing of the body.

“When he died, I gutted his neck and tasted the blood and meat. However, because the knife was blunt, cutting the meat was difficult, and the taste of his veins was unpleasant. But I probably would have liked another part of the body.”

He said he regretted killing that victim:

“I killed that one in Sosnovka in vain, It turned out he was not tasty.”

A video of the court hearing was leaked to social media:

“I nibbled to just take a taste.”
“Are you ready to eat a human again?”
“Do you have some?”

Online media 47news reported that during the interrogation police took Komarov’s handcuffs off, and he screamed: “What are you doing, I can bite you to death!”
“Police thanked Komarov for his confession, twisted his arms behind this time and put the handcuffs back on,” the report said.

Komarov is interested in ‘anarcho-primitivism,’ ‘elixirs of immortality,’ and psychedelic music, according to his social media profile on the Russian site VKontakte.

One comment on social media said:

“You walk on the streets, stroll in the parks without any clue that some pedestrian who looks like an ordinary man, could turn out to be a man eater”

Such is the nature of modern, domestic cannibalism. To the contemporary cannibal, humans are just one more animal, and if you are going to eat pigs or cows, why not add one more mammal to the menu? Fried in butter of course.

Human meat with a vodka chaser: The SIBERIAN CANNIBAL, Nov. 2021

On 28/11/202127/11/2021 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News2 Comments

You don’t often see Siberia in the news, particularly remote towns like Gaz-Sale. But this month (November 16, 2021 to be precise) it made a splash on news sites, with the sentencing of Vladimir Yadne for killing three people and eating their flesh, washed down with vodka.

The murders took place on March 6, 2021. The court heard that Yadne had gone out to buy some hard liquor when, on his way home, he saw a 51-year-old man and 59-year-old woman embracing. It is not clear if he knew them – the total population of the town is 1,800 so it is quite possible. At any rate, he got into an argument with them, and then stabbed them both to death.

Feeling hungry, perhaps from all the exertion, Yadne then cut pieces from the bodies and ate them raw, with his vodka, according to Inna Nosova, the head of the criminal justice department in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region.

“He came in with alcohol on him, and drank it as he was eating the meat.”

Apparently finding the taste to his liking, Yadne later that night stabbed to death another 52-year-old man and ate some of his flesh too. He then tried to dump the bodies (or what was left) but was arrested a few hours later, after police found them. He confessed to the murders and even helped police by recreating the crimes.

Yadne recreates the killings

He underwent psychiatric evaluation, which determined that, at the time of committing the crimes, Yadne was ‘sane’.

The case has at least put Gaz-Sale on the map, with reports in the British tabloid press, US news services, Hindi Newstrack and even withinnigeria.com. One way to get famous I guess. The really fascinating question for me relates to the role of cannibalism in determining the newsworthiness of a story. A man who killed three people in northern Siberia would barely rate a mention in a Russian news outlet, let alone on websites all around the world. Take a bite of the corpses, though, with or without vodka, and everyone wants to know. The conclusion has to be that we are more interested in what happens to dead bodies than living ones.

Yadne has been sentenced to life in a very uncomfortable Siberian prison colony.

Cannibal News – THE ARKHANGELSK CANNIBAL sentenced to life imprisonment

On 14/02/202106/03/2021 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News, On cannibals3 Comments

The Russian Supreme Court has just confirmed the sentence of life imprisonment on Eduard Seleznev, known as the “Arkhangelsk Cannibal”, who killed and ate the flesh of three men.

Seleznev killed three of his friends aged 59, 43 and 34 between March 2016 and March 2017, getting them drunk and then stabbing them to death. He admitted the murders, and added that he had then sliced their bodies up, kept the meat in plastic bags, and disposed of the bodies in the Volokhnitsa river. He subsequently boiled and ate the flesh.

Psychiatrists advised the court that they had found him to be sane and responsible for his actions, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but appealed to the Supreme Court, which has just this week confirmed the earlier sentence and advised that he should never be paroled. He was ordered to pay over one million roubles (roughly $14,000 USD) in compensation to the victims’ families.

The parents of one of the victims had gone looking for their son but found Seleznev living in the man’s flat. After murdering and eating the man’s flesh, Seleznev had decided to stay in the flat and started working at a local meat processing plant. Seleznev told the parents that the man had moved to St. Petersburg, but the family members found odd-looking unpackaged meat lying on the floor. Understandably suspicious, they went to the police.

Seleznev apparently had been convicted for a double murder previously but been released after thirteen years in jail in 2000, and had lived in basements, where he caught and cooked local cats, dogs, birds and other small animals found on the streets. Murder of humans is very often preceded by slaughter of other animals. It is not surprising that Seleznev killed dogs, cats and birds or chose to work in a slaughterhouse.

The sociopathic personality usually develops in early childhood or adolescence and is classified under the diagnosis of “conduct disorder,” which then develops into “anti-social personality disorder” (both of these are listed in the DSM). One of the early signs of a conduct disorder is often cruelty to animals.

Like most jurisdictions, cannibalism is not listed in the Russian criminal code, so Seleznev was charged with murder and misusing the victims’ body parts. To the cannibal, of course, burying good meat is misuse, while eating could be considered – sustainable harvesting?

For more cannibal news, check out https://thecannibalguy.com/category/on-cannibals/

Cannibal hunter: “CHILD 44” (Espinosa, 2015)

On 02/12/201811/09/2021 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films9 Comments

Most cannibal movies are about the cannibal, but Child 44 is almost entirely about the cannibal-hunter. He is a member of Stalin’s secret police, the MGB, the predecessor of the KGB, and the movie is set in the last days of the Stalinist terror. The perp is torturing and killing children and surgically removing their organs, so our hero wants to, like, stop him. There is an administrative problem though: in the Socialist Paradise of the USSR, there is no such thing as murder; it is a capitalist crime. So the first case is put down as a train accident. Then there are 43 more – thus the title.

The film is based on the bestselling book by Tom Rob Smith, the first of a trilogy featuring former MGB Agent Leo Demidov. In the film, Leo is played by the English actor Tom Hardy, with a convincing mix of power and vulnerability that carries an otherwise rather overlong production. Leo is a war hero who planted the red flag on the Reichstag after the conquest of Berlin, and is now a senior investigator.

One of his friends from the Berlin days, Alexei (Fares Fares), also a MGB officer, finds that his little boy has been brutally murdered, but Leo has to persuade him to accept the official explanation that he was hit by a train.

The antagonist (not the killer, we barely see more than his legs or arms until half way through the film) is another veteran of Berlin named Vasili (Joel Kinnaman, who played the clean-cut Republican candidate running against Frank Underwood in House of Cards). He is a coward, liar, etc and manages to derail Leo’s career by accusing Leo’s wife, Raisa (Noomi Rapace from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) of being a spy. Stripped of his rank for refusing to denounce his (maybe) pregnant wife, Leo must start his investigation as a mere militiaman in a remote town. He is under the command of a General played by the brilliant Gary Oldman, who has portrayed everyone from Dracula to Beethoven, Sirius Black to George Smiley, Winston Churchill to Mason Verger (in Hannibal the movie).

The General has two boys and is not pleased when another dead boy, with organs surgically removed, is found nearby. He arrests the man who found the body, not because he thinks he is the killer but because he is gay, and he assumes that a gay man must be responsible (also because homosexuality was a crime in the Soviet Union). But rounding up all the gay men in town doesn’t stop the killings. The killer is seen picking up a boy in a station, later making sweets (where would archetypal paedophiles be without bags of sweets) and still later abusing himself for being weak and prone to remorse.

The film, as I said, is based on a book, which is based on the true story of Andrei Chikatilo, the “Rostov Ripper”, who was eventually convicted of 52 murders, although he confessed to more. Chikatilo was able to continue his killing spree from 1978 to 1995, due to a combination of general ineptitude, official denial of the concept of a Soviet serial killer, and luck (apparently his semen had a different grouping to his blood). He claimed that he had been told by his mother that his older brother had been kidnapped and cannibalised by starving neighbours when he was little. This may have been her way of trying to scare him into behaving, but he was born in Ukraine at the time of the Holodomor, when Stalin was busy starving millions of people to death as part of the process of Collectivisation, so could well have been true. Chikatilo was a self-confessed cannibal, stating that he gained sexual satisfaction from torturing his victims, and would sometimes drink their blood and eat their nipples and tongues. The real Chikatilo was far more depraved than depicted in this movie. There is a list of his crimes at the criminal minds website.

This film has a lot going for it, particularly a first-rate cast, some good action scenes, and a lot of sets which capture the oppressive darkness of Stalinist Russia. But it has a lot of problems too. It’s over two hours and gets a bit tedious in parts, and the decision to have a bunch of English, Swedish, Lebanese, Polish and even Australian actors speak in English with heavy Russian accents to make it seem “authentic” was widely derided by critics. The Guardian critic called the film “an Iron Curtain version of ‘Allo ‘Allo”.

With a Rotten Tomato rating of only 26%, the film bombed at the box office, grossing just $13 million against its $50 million budget. It was banned in Russia, with the Minister of Culture accusing the film of making the Soviet Union look like Mordor. Outrageous of course. Stalin was far worse than Sauron.

And perhaps the worst thing? Just as the Soviets would not admit that there was a serial killer in their paradise, this film does not approach the fact that he was also a cannibal (although it refers briefly to the widespread cannibalism of the Ukrainian famine). It asks some important questions about social ethics and who is actually responsible for people like Chikatilo, the individual or the state and its terrorist organisations. But without people getting eaten, it’s just another very long murder mystery.

The Cannibal Guy

Tag: Russia