Four bodies found in Kohtla-Jarve apartment

Oct 22, 2008
TBT Staff in cooperation with BNS

KOHTLA-JARVE – In one of the most horrific discoveries in recent memory, the bodies of four people who were brutally murdered have been found in an apartment in Northeastern Estonia.

Mari Luuk, spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office, said the victims were a man born 1988, his unmarried partner, their 14-month-old daughter and a young woman born in 1990 who was visiting the couple.

“All the victims had cut and stab wounds and like in any apartment, there were numerous cutting weapons also in that household. But only a complicated expertise can establish whether any of them fits with the victims' wounds,” Kalmar Kase, senior prosecutor at the Viru Regional Prosecutor's Office, was reported as saying by the Baltic News Service.

Speaking with the victims' neighbors, the daily Eesti Paevaleht established that the young man, Ilya, was from the Oru borough of Kohtla-Jarve, while her unmarried partner, Masha, was from Voka. The neighbors described the family as respectable people.

The police was informed of the quadruple murder in the Oru borough Tuesday at 3 p.m. by attentive citizens. The victims' exact time of death will be established by forensic experts, but on the basis of preliminary information it is possible to assert that the murder had not been committed immediately before the police arrived but not much earlier either.

Kalmer Kase, senior prosecutor at the Viru Regional Prosecutor's Office, said that based on preliminary information, the investigation ruled out robbery as the motive, but all other circumstances were still open.

A criminal investigation has been launched but no one has been arrested as suspect so far.

Murder of two or more persons is punishable with eight to 20 years in jail or life imprisonment in Estonia.

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