Polish court to hand over suspect in 2001 Estonian killing spree

Sep 19, 2002
Sara Toth

Polish authorities will extradite a Russian man wanted for four murders in Estonia back to the Baltic state, Estonian police said this week.

Yuri Ustimenko, 21, was arrested May 8 at a northern Poland bus station with a loaded gun after illegally crossing the border from Lithuania.

The Estonian criminal police department requested his extradition immediately following the arrest. A Polish court granted this request Sept. 10, but there is no date set for Ustimenko's return.

"In Poland, he only faced charges for this one little thing - illegal possession of a weapon," said Robert Korvits, a spokesman for the Estonian Police Board. "But he is assumed to have killed five people in Estonia so we want to be able to charge him here."

Estonian police have not yet filed charges against Ustimenko because the suspect has not been returned to their jurisdiction, Korvits said.

Ustimenko, along with his partner, Dmitri Medvedev, is alleged to have killed a taxi driver, two shopkeepers and a young man in a series of crimes in Estonia last spring. The two are also accused of shooting two other Estonian women who survived. After this series of crimes the pair headed to Latvia, where they are accused of killing a police officer, wounding another officer and a security guard in a gunfight.

Medvedev, 21, was killed by the security guard during this incident.

According to Russian officials, Ustimenko and Medvedev fled a military-training school in St. Petersburg in 2001 and illegally resided in Estonia for one year.

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