16 JULY 2018, 13:16 561 6

 

A year after the arrest, Kostin came to court with crutches, and at the last meeting she was on a stretcher. Photo: BGNES

German Kostin was sentenced to life imprisonment without the right to swap for the murder of 5-year-old Nikita Plotnikov.

 

The case ended at first instance in the Sofia City Court after two years of heavy hearings in which the accused complained of various illnesses and held arrogantly in the hall.

 

The murder of the child was committed in February 2015. According to the accusation, Kostin strangled and then put his body in a suitcase and threw it into the Iskar dam near Kokalyane. On the towel with which the child was wrapped, the investigators discovered DNA material that corresponds to that of Kostin. In March 2105, passers-by accidentally struck the body, and days before it was found dead and the mother of the child - Anna Leontieva. Investigators suggest that Kostin also killed her, but no evidence was gathered, and he was not accused.

 

According to the prosecutor's office, the motive for killing the child is related to the hundreds of thousands of euros that Kostin received from the victims' family. He had a real estate business with his wife Leontieva in northern Cyprus, who joined several projects that Kostin offered him. For two years, the defendant received more than € 185,000, and in the last project, the father of the murdered child invested € 260,000. In 2014, Anna Leontieva decided to divorce her husband, and Kostin was worried that she could claim the investments.

 

Kostin had a friendly relationship with the family, and after the divorce he persuaded the woman to move with her child to Bulgaria, where she gave them one of her homes in Sofia. She started asking Kostin for her property deals in northern Cyprus and so he decided to do the murder. Kostin offered to take the mother and child on holiday in Primorsko, the three of them being photographed at gas stations, and then Kostin is detected in the opposite direction only with the child.

 

The mother's body was found on 2 March 2015 to the Thulgian village of Begliktash in the Primorsko region. Having left alone with the minor child, Kostin decided to get rid of him, strangling him, tossing him with a towel and putting him in a suitcase, which he then threw into Iskar Dam.