Two men suspected of eating friend after getting lost in Siberia
Survivor Alexander Abdullaev. Russian Emergencies Ministry/The Siberian Times
Two men lost in Siberia for three months on a fishing trip are suspected of killing and eating their friend in order to survive.
The Siberian Times reports that four men went on an adventure along the remote Sutam River, but just two men returned after they were rescued by a helicopter from the Russian Emergencies Ministry in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia).
Alexander Abdullaev, 37, and Alexei Gradulenko, 35, were found extremely weak after surviving temperatures of below minus 30C.
One body was found but the police do not think the dead man was murdered. One body is still missing and the police are not certain if it is that of Viktor Komarov, 47, or Andrei Kurochkin, 44.
Cuts on the dead man's body suggested to investigators he was cannibalised.
A wooden stake and a blood-stained jacket were also found.
'We suspect the two survivors could have killed and eaten their friend just because of hunger,' an anonymous source told Life News tabloid.
Alexander Abdullaev. Russian Emergencies Ministry/The Siberian Times
'But both deny they have anything to do with his death. Looking at the body parts found at the spot, we clearly saw cuts.
'It means the body was hacked to pieces.
'Now the body parts - some human meat and part of the skull - are taken to the morgue.'
A murder probe has been launched, officials in the town of Neryungri, in remote Yakutia said.
Investigators twice visited the site and removed human body parts, suggesting violent death.
Pravda.ru reported that following their rescue, the two survivors escaped from a hospital and disappeared after police interrogated them.
They were not arrested but preferred to abscond than receive proper medical attention.
The fishing trip began in the Amur region in the Russian Far East and was intended to last two to three weeks. Going north some 300km, they were trapped by floodwater and their UAZ Jeep sank in the swollen river, they told rescuers.
At the end of November they managed to make one phone call but then vanished. Abdullaev's sister Faina Mukhina went to the police in November to report the four fishermen missing before they were found a month later.
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