Ilshat Kuzikov

Ilshat Kuzikov (Russian: Ильшат Кузиков; born February 27, 1960) is a Tajik-born Russian serial killer and cannibal who murdered a minimum of three male acquaintances in his apartment in Saint Petersburg between 1994 and 1995, however he claimed to have began in 1992.

Kuzikov was born in 1960 in the Tajik SSR. He was reported to have had an unstable youth. His father frequently abused his mother, eventually causing her death from injuries sustained in 1973, after the incident Kuzikov and his brother were adopted by their aunt. Kuzikov claimed to have lost compassion after the incident and no longer felt disgust at the sight of blood.

Kuzikov later studied as a welder, and at age 20 moved to Vyborg for military service. Shortly after, in 1982, he committed his first known crime when he attacked a colleague with a wrench, he avoided legal punishment and was diagnosed with schizophrenia and forced to undergo treatment. He would later move to an apartment in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad), where he began a short-lived marriage.

After his marriage failed, he began to spend time with local homeless people and acquaintances from the hospital he was previously treated in, often inviting them in his apartment to drink vodka.

In 1995, locals in Moskovsky District began finding body parts thrown into garbage around the area. Investigators were quickly led to Kuzikov, who left blood in the stairwell outside his apartment, which neighbors complained was omitting a rotten smell. In his poorly furnished apartment police discovered dried human skin and buckets of cooked human flesh. Kuzikov claimed to have killed them because he was too poor to afford enough food with his US$20 monthly pension, and that each victim was murdered and dismembered in his bathroom. Contemporary newspapers claimed he was a homosexual and engaged in bestiality, and killed his victims for refusing to engage in sexual acts, however the veracity of these rumors is unclear.

Kuzikov would be connected to a minimum of three murders, though due to the quantity of meat in his apartment he was suspected of committing several more. In March 1997, he was sentenced to compulsory treatment at a psychiatric hospital along the Arsenalnaya embankment in Saint Petersburg. Some sources suggest he died in the early 2000s, however no definitive information on his fate is known.