female Satanist
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Demented occultists looking for victims as part of their sick rituals pose a real threat to the Russian public, one top analyst has cautioned after a pair of satanists confessed to a gory double murder in a remote woodland.

Speaking to RIA Novosti on Tuesday, Roman Silantyev, the deputy chairman of the Russian Ministry of Justice's advisory council on religion, said that people should be aware of the risks. "The likelihood of becoming a victim of satanists is small, but it is not zero, 20 to 30 people a year can become their victims," he said.

According to him, the groups usually evade detection by hunting down homeless people and those without a fixed abode, ensnaring them for occult ceremonies. "Gangs of Satanists, who were engaged in ritual murders, have repeatedly been identified in Nevinnomyssk, Rybinsk, in the Tula region. Unfortunately, this is a sad norm of our life, Satanists have existed before, and they will continue to exist," the specialist added.

Vakhtang Kipshidze, a top official in Moscow's Orthodox Church, said that "the satanic movement remains a breeding ground for criminals." According to him, "authorities and society need to think about how to protect people from the propaganda of satanism on the internet."

The stark warnings come after two young Russian devil-worshipers confessed last week to luring two 27-year-old friends out to the forests of Karelia, in the country's remote north, murdering them and eating their corpses as part of a twisted ritual. Andrey Tregubenko and Olga Bolshakova were initially detained on drugs charges before admitting to investigators that they had committed the slayings back in 2016.

Police probing the case after the pair's shocking admission later found the dismembered remains of one victim in a woodland area, north of St. Petersburg. The families of the murdered youngsters had apparently been searching for years for their missing children, while the whereabouts of their bodies was known only to their killers.

In 2010, a pair of self-described Russian goths were convicted of killing and cannibalizing a 16-year-old schoolgirl, Karina Buduchian. The duo, Maksim Glavatskikh and Yuri Mozhnov, were sentenced to nearly two decades each in high-security prison colonies, with the prosecutor describing their actions as "monstrous."