A convicted Russian cryptocurrency fraudster and his wife watched each other being tortured to death in a desert in the United Arab Emirates after their kidnappers failed to extract £380 million from their accounts, it has been reported.
Roman Novak and his wife, Anna, were last seen on October 2 after being lured to the resort of Hatta, 80 miles outside of Dubai, by criminals posing as potential investors.
Police dug up a 500-by-500-metre stretch of desert in the Hajar mountains, near the border with Oman – where their mobile phones were last detected – to recover their remains more than a month later.
Since then, further details about the fate of the couple have been reported by Russian media.
Before their murders, Roman and Anna were tortured to force them to give up the access codes to their cryptocurrency wallets – but they were empty.
Metro has decided not share the details surrounding the torture methods because of how gruesome they are.
Their bodies were then packed in thick polyethylene bags and doused with chemicals – strong solvents to speed up the decomposition process and destroy DNA evidence.
An investigation was launched after the pair’s family alerted police in Dubai that they had gone missing and were assumed to have been kidnapped.
Roman was sentenced to six years in prison in Russia for large-scale fraud in 2020.
After being granted parole, he left for the UAE, where he launched a crypto app called Fintopio, for which he reportedly raised investment worth £380 million, before allegedly defrauding investors.
Svetlana Petrenko, of the Russian Investigative Committee, said: ‘The investigation has established that the killers had accomplices who helped organise the abduction.
‘They rented cars and premises where the two victims were held by force.
‘After the murder, the perpetrators disposed of the knives and the victims’ personal belongings, leaving them in different emirates.’
Three men have since been arrested in St Petersburg and charged after they made the journey back from the UAE.
They were named as Russian citizens Konstantin Shakht, a former police officer, along with Yury Sharypov and Vladimir Dalekin.
Sharypov and Dalekin have both pleaded guilty, while Shakht denies the charges.
All defendants have been remanded in custody until December 28.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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