Three Russian sisters, who were indicted on charges of murdering their abusive father, may face more than 20 years in jail.
After having suffered years of torture and abuse from their father, Mikhail Kachaturyan, the three of them confessed to having killed him.
Khachaturyan's body was found on a staircase in a Moscow apartment block in July 2018, with dozens of knife wounds to his chest and neck. Hours before his death, he had returned from a psychiatric clinic, lined up his three daughters to chastise them for the messy apartment and pepper-sprayed their faces, according to investigators and the sisters' lawyers. The eldest daughter Krestina, who has asthma, fainted. That is when the sisters—Krestina, 19, Angelina, 18, and Maria, 17— decided to kill him.They attacked him with a hammer, a knife, and pepper spray.
Family members including Mikhail’s sisters and nephew say that the stories of sexual and physical abuse were fabricated and the sisters merely wanted their father out of their lives. Arsen Khachaturyan, Mikhail’s nephew said, “Sexual violence, other violence, there was nothing of that. The girls decided to kill their father, they conspired a while ago.”
Last summer, when the sisters were accused of planned murder, there was uproar among activists in Russia, which is grappling with a far-reaching domestic abuse problem.
The case became a cause of celebration for rights groups, who have been fighting to pass a law to protect victims of domestic abuse which was shelved by parliament in 2016.
The trial opened on Thursday, in a Moscow courtroom. The two elder sisters, Krestina and Angelina, will stand trial together. According to one of the sisters’ lawyers, Maria, who was a minor at the time of the killing but indicted after she turned 18, has been deemed mentally unfit to commit murder and will be tried separately on a murder charge.
In texts obtained from their father's phone by one of the sisters’ lawyers, Mikhail Khachaturyan is said to have threatened to kill them and sexually abuse them and their mother. “I will beat you up for everything, I will kill you,” says one text from April 2018, accusing them of having sexual relations with a male friend. “You are prostitutes and you will die as prostitutes”. Interrogation transcripts indicate mental, physical and sexual abuse, at least four years before the trio decided to kill their father, a CNN report reads.
