Two men have been arrested on suspicion of murdering the director of a Coca-Cola factory in St. Petersburg who had been missing since Friday, Russia's Investigative Committee said Wednesday.
The suspects gave statements that allowed investigators to recover the body of Dmitry Soshnev, the committee said in a statement. Soshnev, 37, had not been in contact with his family since he left his St. Petersburg home at about 8 a.m. on Friday to go to work, local prosecutors said.
Investigators named the suspects as convicted murderer Vyacheslav Finogenov and Denis Chkhitauri, an Azerbaijani national. According to investigators, the two men arranged to meet Soshnev near garages in St. Petersburg's Frunzensky district on Friday.
Finogenov shot Soshnev with a firearm, before he and Chkhitauri stole 150,000 rubles ($2,850) from the businessman, as well as the ownership documents to his BMW, which they intended to sell for 1 million rubles ($19,000), the Investigative Committee statement said.
Several Russian media outlets have reported that Soshnev had a drug addiction and that the suspects in his murder were his dealers. This information has not been confirmed by investigators.
The St. Petersburg branch of the Investigative Committee said Tuesday that it had launched a murder case following a preliminary investigation into Soshnev's disappearance, but did not reveal how it came to suspect that the factory director had been killed.
Soshnev is not the first manager of a foreign company's Russian assets to go missing.
In December 2012, Yakov Fominykh, Hitachi's business development director in Russia, was last seen leaving the Moscow traffic police department. Fominykh's body was recovered the next day on the side of a rural road in the Tver region.
In October, a man was sentenced to nine years in prison over Fominykh's abduction and death, the Rosbalt news agency reported.
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