A pensioner has been arrested on suspicion of murdering three people after the severed penis of a missing man was found in his garden.
The gruesome discovery was made in the remote village of Severnoye in Siberia, Russia and led to a search which unearthed the remains of another two men.
Victor Zakharov, 66, was detained on April 20 and police are now investigating whether he ate his alleged victims
According to local media, a neighbour raised the alarm after seeing her missing husband's bicycle in Zakharov's yard.
Police had previously been searching for Petr Lysyany, 36.
Zakharov, a scrap metal dealer, admitted to drinking with Lysyany several days earlier but claimed the man had gone home drunk.
Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reports that "at that moment a policeman saw a severed penis in the yard".
"He went inside, and began to check the grounds.
"As a result, parts of the missing man’s body were found in the outside toilet and the garden."
According to the report, officers then found two skeletons in the pensioner's cellar.
The two other victims are believed to be Viktor Dryumov, 63, who went missing last year, and Sergey Tikhonov, 53.
"In the cellar, they removed the plank floor and found two skeletons," it adds.
"One of the dead was identified by a pin in his leg.
"This man disappeared a little over a year ago."
Officers said that Zakharov, who has previously served a 15 year sentence for the murder of his sister in 1991, had confessed to the killings and using an axe to dismember his victim's bodies.
The grounds of his house have now been excavated.
He had been interrogated on the disappearance of Dryumov and Tikhonov but passed a lie detector test.
He is now being investigated over the disappearance of 14-year-old Alexey Bakun in 2012.
Local residents described Zakharov as a quiet and introverted man who enjoyed fishing.
Police say as yet they have no proof he ate his dismembered victims.
A neighbour said: "This man collected scrap metal, we constantly saw him in the village with a cart, made from an iron bath.
"In appearance - he’s an ordinary man.
"Yes, he he was a drinker... but we felt sorry for him. We never thought he was killing people."
The investigation continues.
