A young Ukrainian student was tortured and burned alive in the Austrian capital Vienna after allegedly being lured into a trap over his cryptocurrency fortune.
The case has chilling parallels with the double murder of a Russian cryptocurrency scammer and his wife, who were forced to watch each other being tortured to death before their remains were encased in concrete and buried in United Arab Emirates desert.
The Ukrainian victim was identified as Danilo Kuzmin, 21, the son of the deputy mayor of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, Sergey Kuzmin, after his burned body was found on the back seat of a Mercedes under a bridge in the Donaustadt district of Vienna on November 26.
It is understood that Danilo had lived in Vienna for years as a university student, with his family and a close acquaintance filing a missing persons report after he suddenly stopped answering his phone.
Police said the case was largely solved when detectives, working with Ukrainian authorities and Europol, identified two Ukrainian suspects aged 19 and 45 and had them arrested in Ukraine on November 29 under international warrants.
Media in both countries reported that the younger suspect studied at the same university as Danilo and that CCTV from the underground car park of the luxury Sofitel hotel on November 25 showed several men overwhelming the victim, with witnesses later noticing a large bloodstain in the stairwell.
Police said Danilo’s body was about 80 per cent burned and showed massive blunt force trauma, including head injuries and broken teeth, with investigators believing he died from suffocation or heat shock around the time the fire began.
Detectives believe he was forced onto the back seat of his family’s Mercedes and driven to a garden area in Donaustadt, where the vehicle was set alight using petrol.
Firefighters only discovered the body after extinguishing the flames, and experts ruled out a technical fault because the diesel-powered car had been doused in petrol.
A melted fuel canister recovered from the rear seat was traced to a Vienna petrol station, where CCTV allegedly showed one suspect buying two cans of petrol shortly before the killing.
Austrian police reported that sizeable sums vanished from Danilo’s cryptocurrency wallets around the time of the attack, and one detained man was found carrying a large amount of U.S. dollars.
A resident noticed the burning car and immediately alerted the emergency services.
The body was discovered at around 12.30am local time on November 26 near an allotment garden on Marlen-Haushofer-Weg.
Danilo was identified by his dental records, according to Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung.
Colonel Gerhard Winkler, head of Vienna’s state criminal office, said investigators were assuming a financial motive and had ruled out any political background.
Ukrainian media also reported that Danilo had been kept in the vehicle for several hours and tortured until he allegedly revealed access codes for his crypto accounts before the car was set on fire.
The suspects were arrested in the port city of Odessa a day after entering the country, with the KORD special unit assisting, and a court ordered both men be held for 40 days.
Austrian police said the suspects would not be extradited but would face prosecution in Ukraine after Austria agreed to transfer the case.
Russian cryptocurrency fraudster Roman Novak, and his wife, Anna, were allegedly encased in concrete and dumped in a desert in the UAE after they were forced to watch each other being stabbed to death, it has emerged.
Investigators handling the case say the remains of the couple were discovered in November, weeks after they had vanished, with the bodies found cast in concrete and buried deep in the sand.
Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, citing a source close to the inquiry, said: ‘They were poured into concrete. The remains were found back in November.’
Authorities in the Emirates recovered the couple’s bodies during a search in a remote desert location, but had been weighing up whether to send the remains to Russia for forensic analysis and eventual burial.
Novak, 38, and Anna, 37, were reported missing in early October by relatives who raised the alarm after repeatedly failing to contact them.
According to early investigative reports, the pair had been lured to a rented villa in Hatta, 80 miles from Dubai, by men posing as potential investors before being abducted and tortured for access to cryptocurrency accounts believed to contain hundreds of millions of dollars.
With the kidnappers unable to extract the digital wallet codes, the couple were allegedly stabbed and forced to face one another as they died.
It has been claimed that the killers packed their bodies into strong polyethene bags and used industrial-strength solvents to speed up decomposition in order to get rid of DNA traces.
Officials say the couple were driven to Hatta by their personal driver but disembarked to join another vehicle for the rest of the journey.
Novak then sent desperate messages to his contacts from his phone to them them he was ‘stuck in the mountains on the Oman border’ and urgently needed £152,000.
Shortly after the messages, all contact with the couple was lost.
According to investigators, the trail of the couple’s mobile phones showed activity for several days after their disappearance, with signals pinging in Hatta near the UAE-Oman border, then later mysteriously near Cape Town, South Africa, before going dark on October 4.
Detectives have suggested their phones were turned on in several locations in an attempt to confuse investigators.
Several Russian nationals have been detained on suspicion of involvement, including former police officer Constantin Shakht, Yury Sharypov and Vladimir Dalekin.
While Sharypov and Dalekin have both pleaded guilty to the crime, Shakht continues to deny playing a role.
The men were arrested after returning to Russia from the UAE. Dramatic police footage showed how the suspects were apprehended.
Novak had a long history of financial deceit – he was sentenced to six years in a general-regime penal colony in Russia in 2020 for large-scale fraud before leaving for the UAE following his release on parole.
In Dubai, he presented himself as a successful crypto entrepreneur and claimed to be behind a new payment platform designed for rapid cryptocurrency transfers.
Investigators say he persuaded investors from China, the Middle East and elsewhere to pour funds into his scheme, allegedly raising the equivalent of about £380million by promising ties to major tech companies and boasting of powerful industry connections.
Russian outlets have also linked him to an earlier fraud case involving alleged deception of business partners and losses of more than 7 million roubles.
Those claims, according to Russian media, may have contributed to the network of financial disputes surrounding Novak before his death.
