- MOSCOW -- Two Russian teenagers
kidnapped by a man posing as a taxi driver have been freed by police after
being kept in a cellar and raped repeatedly for more than three years.
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- The girls, aged 14 and 17 when they were seized on Sept
30, 2000, were discovered in a specially constructed cellar under a garage
belonging to a 53-year-old machinery plant worker.
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- The case has close parallels with that of Marc Dutroux,
who is on trial in Belgium for kidnapping six young girls, keeping them
in a dungeon and later killing four of them.
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- According to prosecutors and local media reports, the
girls, identified only as Yekaterina and Yelena, were lured into a Lada
car by Viktor Mokhov, 53, who promised to take them home from a discotheque
in the town of Ryazan.
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- Mokhov plied them with vodka that apparently contained
a tranquiliser. When they awoke they were underground. For the first two
years neither girl was allowed out of the cellar, which was sealed with
three trapdoors.
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- Later Mokhov occasionally took each out for a short nocturnal
walk. Meanwhile he raped the girls repeatedly. Yelena gave birth to two
sons who were then abandoned. She is now pregnant for a third time.
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- Irina Sablina, a senior deputy prosecutor, said: "The
suspect was holding the girls in a cellar at his house so he could commit
violent sexual acts on them."
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- During the first two years, Mokhov apparently behaved
brutally with the girls, often starving them into submission. Later, prosecutors
say, he eased his harsh regime a little, giving them more food, new clothes,
books and a television set.
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- One of the girls even began to study English. Local people
said Mokhov was a good neighbour who since divorcing in 1979 had lived
quietly with his mother.
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- They became suspicious only when they noticed the unusual
quantity of food Mokhov's mother was buying, but even then no one raised
the alarm.
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- When the second baby was abandoned, Yelena hid a note
in his nappy telling the world of the girls' plight but Mokhov changed
the nappy and found the note.
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- Police refused to disclose how they finally found the
girls but according to one account Mokhov boasted to drinking partners
of his "harem". Another said one of the girls managed to pass
a note to a neighbour during a night-time walk.
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- Investigators say they have located the two missing babies
at a local orphanage.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004
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