Russia was shocked on Thursday by the kidnapping of a boy of six and his 11-year-old sister, who were bundled into a car and abducted as they strolled home from a sports lesson.
Dmitry Borodulin and his sister Alexandra had been collected by their father, Pavel, from a sports club in St. Petersburg. They were walking near the Hermitage museum when five men leapt on Borodulin and hit him over the head before grabbing the children and speeding off. The case has provoked outrage in a country already reeling from a series of horrific child murders.
Borodulin and his wife are musicians who studied in St. Petersburg's prestigious conservatory. They had recently inherited two flats, which they rented out, but were scarcely wealthy by the standards of modern Russia, police said, adding that the kidnapping had been carefully planned.
No ransom note has been received. Detectives suspect the kidnapping was done by criminals and that it may have been a case of mistaken identity.
"Witnesses in a nearby house saw the children being dragged into the car," Alexander Yurasov, a prosecutor, said. Their father was recovering in hospital.
"He suffered a serious trauma to his head but is conscious and able to talk," a doctor at Polenov hospital told Gazeta newspaper.
Their mother, Janna, is said to be in shock and hardly able to speak.
Last year 817 children were murdered or seriously wounded, and 170,000 were victims of adult violence.
Alcoholism, neglect and official indifference have turned the problem into a national scandal.
Last week a girl of 15 in Krasnoyarsk vanished, days after a four-year-old girl near Moscow was found dead in a forest.
In April a five-year-old boy in Novgorod disappeared and in Krasnoyarsk the body of Polina Malkova, five, was found after a huge hunt.
She had been mutilated, beaten and tortured -- prompting MPs to consider a new law on child protection.
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