A music teacher in the Moscow region has been arrested on suspicion of hiring a hit man to kill a 15-year-old student, Russian media reported Wednesday, citing investigators.
The 52-year-old teacher was detained Tuesday as she attempted to hand over payment for the hit to an undercover officer posing as a hit man, who told her that the boy had been killed, the regional branch of the Investigative Committee said in a statement. She faces charges of organizing the attempted murder of a minor.
The teacher, who worked in the town of Shatura, offered to pay the undercover police officer 100,000 rubles ($2,000) to kill the teenager, the statement said.
Russian television channel NTV showed a video of the teacher, identified as Yulia Simonova, asking a man to kill the ninth-grader.
"Break one of his arms. … Bust his kidneys. So that he hurts. … But I want to see the condition that he's in — I want to see him suffering. And I want to say a couple of tender words to him," she says in the video.
The report said that she saved up money for an entire year to have the boy killed, and that she asked a local martial arts instructor at least three times to find someone to do the job, after which he contacted the police.
The investigators' statement said the teacher hired the hit man because of a "personal dislike" of the boy. Russian media reported, however, that the teacher may have had romantic feelings for the teen and been jealous of a girl he had started dating.
In 2013, a 41-year-old teacher in the southern Russian city of Volgograd was detained after reportedly seeking to have a male former student beaten half to death and his fiancee gang-raped because the teacher was in love with him and jealous of the fiancee.
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