Nazi-saluting taxi driver confesses to killing young woman who wouldn’t sleep with him on their first date
Sergey Sokolov flew into a rage when shop assistant Kristina Medvedeva turned down sex after he bought her a kebab
A Russian cabbie has confessed to beheading a woman because she refused to have sex with him on their first date.
Nazi-saluting taxi driver Sergey Sokolov, 46, claimed there was "chemistry" between him and shop assistant Kristina Medvedeva but he became enraged when she refused to sleep with him after he bought her a kebab, say police.
He admitted to killing her and then told detectives he went to find a "cutting tool" and severed her head.
He dumped her badly mutilated and headless corpse in a small lake on the outskirts of Eketerinburg, Russia's fourth city, close to a residential area called Michurinsky.
Then he took her head and drove around the city in his taxi.
Finally, he dropped it in a rubbish skip in the industrial Uralmash suburb, he explained to police.
Shocking images of the headless woman posted by major Russian news source LifeNews suggest she was almost naked when he killed her.
He told police that after buying her a shish kebab they had gone to the lake, but she had spurned his "offer to have sex", leading to his fury.
A police source said investigators are checking how and when he met her, and whether he kidnapped the shop assistant before killing her.
A picture posted by heavily tattooed Sokolov showed him standing in a river or lake making a Nazi salute.
When he was initially arrested he had to be restrained, said police.
An extraordinary picture in a police cell shows him with his hands tethered behind his back, lying faced down.
Police said he later confessed and gave police an account of how he killed her.
In social media, Medvedeva had posted her relationship status as "actively searching" on her social media, and she was known use at least one prominent dating website.
After leaving home for the fateful meeting with Sokolov, she was not seen for three days before her headless corpse was found.
Police initially said there was no evidence that she had been raped.
But full forensic tests are now underway.
The young woman had moved from her provincial hometown Talitsa in search of love and a new life, say friends.
She shared a flat with a girlfriend, and it was earlier reported she had gone on a first date with a stranger on July 24 - the day she was murdered.