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"Cemetery collector" with 29 bodies arrested

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Russian police arrest suspected grave robber

Tue, Nov 8 2011

1 of 3. A still image taken from undated police footage shot inside the flat of Anatoly Moskvin and released to Reuters on November 8, 2011 shows books, clothes and dressed figures, reportedly mummified bodies desecrated from cemeteries. Russian police have arrested a man described by local media as the ''cemetery collector'' for digging up 29 corpses and dressing the remains in female clothing to display around his flat. Police discovered dolls and corpses dressed as dolls during the search.

Credit: Reuters/Handout

MOSCOW | Tue Nov 8, 2011 4:45pm EST

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian police have arrested a man described by local media as the "cemetery collector" for digging up 29 corpses and dressing the remains in female clothing to display around his flat.

Grainy police video images of the man's cramped flat showed what look like several life-sized female dolls without faces, some with platinum blond wigs.

"During a search of his flat and garage, 29 self-made, life-size dolls dressed in the clothes of buried people were found," a spokesman for police in Nizhny Novgorod, 400 km (250 miles) east of Moscow, said Tuesday.

"It was ascertained that he used mummified human bodies from graves to make them (the dolls)."

Police described the man, who was arrested following the desecration of graves in the area, as a local historian and an expert in the study of place names.

Media cited friends as saying they had never seen the dolls and that he was a learned, if eccentric, man.

(Reporting By Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Matthew Jones)
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Comments (3)
AlisonR1 wrote:
This is pretty creepy. I don’t get what would compel a person to dig up buried bodies and make dolls of them. Doesn’t he know you’re not supposed to disturb the dead? If I were one of those buried parts I would totally come back and haunt him for the rest of his life! :)

Nov 09, 2011 7:30pm EST  --  Report as abuse
Mokkie wrote:
He obviously needs help. I can only hope that he gets it

Nov 10, 2011 12:25pm EST  --  Report as abuse
Marla wrote:
Perhaps he wanted companions that wouldn’t talk his ear off.

Nov 11, 2011 7:19am EST  --  Report as abuse
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