Let's back on up, shall we?
Last week, on the morning of April 19, Ivan was kidnapped as he walked to work in the north part of Moscow. A student in his fourth (out of five) year of college at the Mathematics and Cybernetics Department of Moscow State University, Ivan was doing an internship at InfoWatch, a data security firm run by his mom, Natalya Kaspersky, a co-founder of Kaspersky Labs. (Incidentally, guess who teaches at that department where Ivan is studying? The father of Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy.)
The kidnappers -- unclear who they were -- were demanding 3 million Euros from Ivan's parents. With some $800 million to his name, Ivan's father Eugene had just been named one of Russia's richest businessmen just the previous day by Russian Forbes.
After a false report in the press that Ivan had been freed -- later revealed to be a red herring intended by the state security services to calm the kidnappers - Ivan was finally freed by a swarm of FSB agents on Sunday.
The young man seemed unharmed, and the police made surprisingly quick headway in their investigation. Two days after the raid, they had rounded up five suspects, three of whom were related to each other. One of them, Nikolay Savelyev, instantly admitted his guilt, but added, "No one hit him, no one tried to dismember him. I treated Vanya like my own." (Apparently, the 'nappers held him in the banya of a house they rented outside of Moscow. They also made the ransom calls from their own easily traceable phones.)
Savelyev also wanted to shift the blame away from his "elderly" wife. (She's 63.) The court also arrested his son, also named Nikolay, who was once a hockey player. Jr. used the old "dad made me do it" excuse.
As for Nikolay Sr., the man claimed he plotted the heist to pay for medical care. "I needed the money for medical treatment," he was quoted as saying. "In order to live and not to die." Reports of diabetes and ischemic heart disease abounded. Then the 60 year old fessed up: "I'm just old."
Oh, and Nikolay Sr. was once arrested in 1975. He was found insane, and let go. Unclear for what.
via Kommersant
