A man who forced his fiancé to drink highly-concentrated acid while her five-year-old son watched has been jailed for 19 years.
Driver Alexander Larin, 33, poisoned Olga Ryadchikova using acetic acid while her son Nikita looked on.
The dangerous acid caused "chemical burns" to the mouth, pharynx, oesophagus, stomach, upper respiratory tract, and "severe toxic damage" to her internal organs, a Russian court heard.
The 42-year-old beauty therapist was left in severe agony as she burned inside and could not walk, eat and drink.
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She died from acute poisoning three days later.
Nikita witnessed the man who was soon to become his stepfather poison his mother and remains “haunted” by the memory, the court was told.
Larin and the victim had been due to get married this year.
The boy said: “He made my mummy drink white beer, and she spat it out like a fountain. She was lying in the corridor and squirming like a worm.”
Larin claimed the woman voluntarily drank the acid which is used in diluted quantities to pickle cucumbers.
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He also prevented her getting medical treatment, only later calling an ambulance to say that his lover had tried to kill herself, the court heard.
But post-mortem tests showed that she died of excruciating pain with her insides burned by the acid.
The court found that she had been forced to drink a cocktail of at least 50 millilitres of 70 per cent-strength acetic acid.
Nikita told how “mummy looked into my eyes. Then she closed her eyes, and did not open them again.”
Olga’s mother Galina said: “He saw his mother's body being taken away. He thinks these were doctors.
“He is still waiting for her to be cured and allowed home again.”
The victims’s aunt Valentina Fominykh, 66, who found her dead in the flat, hit out at the 19 year sentence.
“He should have been given life,” she said. “Such a person must never be free….he will harm someone else.”
Nikita is now being raised by his maternal grandmother.
