Murder charges dropped against 3 Moscow sisters who killed abusive father

In a case which has shocked Russians, three Khachaturian sisters admitted to killing their father after he subjected them to mental, sexual, and physical abuse spanning years.

They faced charges of premeditated murder, but now their lawyer says the Russian Prosecutor General’s office has ordered investigators to drop that arraignment, and instead reclassify the killing as lawful self-defense.

Lawyer Aleksey Parshin told TASS news agency that officials have declined to support the Investigative Committee’s case against the sisters. Parshin said that the Khachaturians responded to their father’s “unlawful attacks, which created a real danger to their life and health,” and that the prosecutor general regarded their actions as “within the legal limits of necessary self-defense, which brings the criminal prosecution to an end.”

On July 27, 2018, the body of Mikhail Khachaturian was found with multiple stab wounds in a house on Altufevskoye Shosse in Moscow. Khachaturian’s three teenage daughters – Krestina, Angelina, and Maria – were arrested on suspicion of their father’s murder.

The case against the Khachaturian sisters entered the public consciousness in June 2019, when the sisters’ defense lawyers said they killed their father after years of physical and sexual abuse. These revelations caused mass public outcry over the case, leading to public protests in many large cities and messages of support from well-known celebrities, such as journalist and former presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak. Some people, however, do regard the sisters as murderers.

In December 2019, despite the calls for leniency, Russia’s Investigative Committee announced that the sisters would be charged with premeditated murder, and face up to 20 years in jail. With the charges now dropped, the Khachaturian sisters could soon be free.

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