Alexey Mikhalenya

Alexey Arkadyevich Mikhalenya (; 1984 – May 15 or 16, 2018) was a Belarusian serial killer and criminal who killed five people in the Gomel Region from 2002 to 2016, three of the killings were committed while he was still a teenager. For his latter murders, he was sentenced to death and subsequently executed in 2018.

Early life and first murders Little is known of Mikhalenya's personal life. He was born in 1984 in the Yelʹsk District, and by the time of his latest arrest, he had not completed his secondary education and was unemployed.

At the age of 17, Mikhalenya began terrorizing the pensioners living next door by extorting them for money so he could buy alcohol. In October 2002, he and a friend of his had been drinking together when they planned to rob a pensioner for money. The pair then broke through the window of a neighbor's house and robbed him, and when the man tried to talk to Mikhalenya on the following day, he was hit with a wooden rolling pin.

A week later, Mikhalenya and his friend decided to rob the neighbors, sneaking in at night via the window. However, they woke up the husband and wife by accident, forcing them to grab a shovel and hit the man on the head. The two home invaders then beat, stomped and stabbed the victims with a welding rod before fleeing the house. They returned on the following day in order to clean up the murder scene and wash away the bloodstains before wrapping the bodies up in blankets and putting them in a wheelbarrow. Upon doing so, they pushed it to the Pripyat River, tied some ceramic drainage pipes to the bodies and then dumped them into the water.

Not long after, Mikhalenya and another accomplice were hanging around in the forested area of the Mazyr District when they came across a 67-year-old mushroom hunter by chance. They beat and robbed him on the spot, with Mikhalenya stabbing him in the neck. While the victim was still alive, the pair threw some olive branches over him and left him to die at the bottom of a ravine.

Arrest and investigation A few days after this attack, the pair carried out a robbery in the village of Protyuki, beating up the saleswoman and stealing money from the store's cash register. This was apparently noticed by a group of hunters who fired their guns into the air, scaring the criminals off and forcing them to flee through the emergency exit, with the hunters' dogs chasing after them. As the first neighbor did not have any, he then went to the apartment of 61-year-old Viktor Fateyev, a pensioner who lived with his 59-year-old sister, Raisa. At that time, Mikhalenya was intoxicated since he had spent most of the day drinking with a friend.

At his later murder trial, Mikhalenya claimed that Fateyev attacked him unprovoked, with Raisa also jumping him with a stick, but missing and hitting her brother instead. According to his version of events, Mikhalenya broke free of their grasp and attempted to calm them down, but Fateyev then stormed out of the house and headed outside, where he attempted to flag a car for help. Seemingly unwilling to deal with police due to his recent release, Mikhalenya punched him twice in the stomach and then started beating Raisa, who had attempted to flee. He then started punching, beating and stabbing them with a knife, alternating between the two victims before he finally beat Viktor to death with a stick as he attempted to crawl away.

When he noticed that Raisa was also still alive, Mikhalenya violently pushed her onto a bench, causing her to crash into the window sill and make some of the nails fall out of it. Using these nails, he then proceeded to gouge the woman's eyes out. After killing them, he dumped Raisa's body in the basement of the house and Viktor's body in the vegetable garden, before returning home and washing away the bloodstains. Throughout the proceedings, he admitted his guilt only partially and was described as indifferent.

On March 17, he was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death. In addition, he was ordered to pay a total 50,000 rubels to the victims' family members in damages. Reportedly, Mikhalenya accepted the sentence, saying that he regretted what he had done and could not explain why he had done it, adding that a life term would not be worth it. His was the first death sentence to be handed in the country in 2017.

On June 30, his appeal was presented before the Supreme Court, which included materials that showed that the convict had suffered numerous bodily injuries during the scuffle, including a smashed nose and hematomas on the neck. It alleged that the district court deliberately ignored these findings and that from the two sobriety tests he had undergone, the neutral one had been omitted from the trial. In his plea, Mikhalenya stated that he was remorseful for his crimes and would do anything he could to repay the victims' family members, asking that he be re-sentenced to life imprisonment instead.

Execution On May 29, 2018, another death row inmate, Vyacheslav Sukharko, reported on the apparent execution of Mikhalenya in his own appeal to the Supreme Court. According to him, he and another inmate, Viktor Lyotov, were taken away from their cells in Pishchalauski Castle on the night between May 15 and 16, and never returned.

In September 2021, the Council published its decision on the case, finding numerous violations committed during the trial. It concluded that Mikhalenya's right to life had been violated under Article 6 of the ICCPR guidelines, claiming that he had been given an unfair trial.