A 21-year-old student who confided in a uni pal about his rich dad ended up allegedly tortured then burned alive as his attackers forced him to reveal his Ukrainian dad’s secret passwords
A student was tortured for his dad’s crypto riches then allegedly burned alive after being forced into the back seat of his family’s Mercedes.
It’s believed 21-year-old Danilo Kuzmin, who was studying in Vienna, was set upon in the underground parking garage of the luxury Sofitel Hotel. One of his attackers was allegedly a fellow student from Ukraine he had confided in.
He’d told him about the crypto riches of his dad, Sergey Kuzmin, the deputy mayor of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Police believe he was attacked and beaten at the hotel car park before being driven away and kept in the vehicle for several hours while he was tortured – until he revealed access codes for his two crypto accounts.
He was then driven to the garden Donaustadt district of Vienna where the car was set alight, with the victim still inside. According to the Krone news website in Austria, Danilo was lured into a trap for his family fortune, after fleeing the war.
The gruesome attack has chilling echoes of the double murder in Dubai of a Russian crypto couple recently found dead in the UAE desert. According to forensic experts, Danilo’s body was about 80 per cent burned.
His corpse showed massive blunt force trauma, including head injuries and broken teeth. Police were alerted after his family and a close acquaintance filed missing persons reports after he suddenly stopped answering his phone.
Police say the case was largely solved when investigators identified two Ukrainian suspects aged 19 and 45. The pair were arrested on November 29th in Ukraine three days after Danilo’s body was found.
They were tracked down by Ukrainian authorities working alongside Europol. Both Austrian and Ukrainian media have reported the younger suspect studied at the same university as Danilo.
Sinister CCTV footage from the underground car park at the luxury Sofitel hotel on November 25th showed several men surround the victim. Witnesses later reported hearing a commotion then finding a large blood stain in the stairwell.
Investigators found a melted canister on the back seat with a smell of gasoline, although the car was running on diesel fuel. The autopsy reportedly showed severe burns – ‘approximately 80% of the body was affected’. There were also signs of massive blunt force trauma, including head injuries and broken teeth.
The police reportedly said: “The autopsy showed that the victim died a violent death’. The car was intentionally set on fire, and there were signs of the use of an accelerant. One version is that the man was beaten and then placed in the car to cover up the traces of the crime.”
Emergency services only discovered his body after firefighters doused the flames. Experts ruled out a technical fault because the diesel-powered car had been doused in petrol. Officers recovered a melted fuel canister from the rear seat and traced it to a Vienna petrol station.
CCTV from the station allegedly shows one of the suspects buying two cans of petrol prior to the killing. The Ukrainian suspects will not be handed over to Austria.
Instead, it is understood Ukraine officials are requesting to transfer the criminal proceedings to them. Austrian police have alleged that sizable amounts vanished from Danilo’s family cryptocurrency wallets around the time of the attack, while one of the detained man was found with a large amount of US dollars.
Head of Vienna’s state criminal office, Colonel Gerhard Winkler, said investigators were assuming a financial motive and had ruled out any political background. The suspects were arrested in the port city of Odessa a day after returning to the country and a court has since ordered both men be held for 40 days.
Danilo’s alleged murder comes after a Russian crypto millionaire and his wife were discovered encased in concrete in Dubai. They had gone travelling to meet potential ‘investors’. Roman Novak, 38, and his wife Anna, 37, were kidnapped in October and forced to watch each other tortured. It is said Novak was a wanted and convicted cryptocurrency fraudster.
The alleged killers are all Russian nationals and are said to have accessed Novak’s £380 million fortune but found his wallet empty. They murdered the pair and dismembered their bodies before pouring concrete over them according to some reports overseas.