Three sisters who claim they stabbed their father to death in self-defence because he was sexually abusing them are unlikely to be jailed after new evidence shows they suffered deep trauma as a result of his relentless cruelty, reports Daily Mail.
A fresh psychiatric evaluation improves the chances that none of the siblings will be jailed for stabbing patriarch Mikhail Khachaturyan, 57, with his own hunting knife as he slept in his Moscow flat in 2018.
Krestina and Angelina Khachaturyan, then 19 and 18, along with younger sister Maria, 17, admitted killing the ‘tyrant’ after facing ‘years of abuse’.
They said they were raped and violated by their father in regular incestuous attacks, yet despite this, murder charges remain against the elder two siblings, while the third could also face punishment for his death.
However, the new evaluation demanded by the court will become key evidence at their upcoming trial, and found that their father had ‘special sexual preferences’ and abused them as a paedophile.
Khachaturyan tortured the sisters and held them under his sway, say psychiatric experts at Russia’s respected Serbsky Centre.
Lawyer Maria Davtyan said: ‘The experts found that since 2014 each of the girls has suffered from abuse syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder.
‘All of these conditions in his daughters have a direct causal relationship from Khachaturian’s actions.’
The sisters suffered from ‘a violation of the ability to overcome (his) coercion’ and ‘they could not resist him.
Then they killed him as he slept they were in an ‘unstable’ psychological state and felt ‘hopeless’, fearing for their lives. The sisters were all victims, she said.
Other family members have accused the sisters of lying about their father’s sexual abuse and killing him for his money.
Another lawyer Alexei Liptser representing the sisters said: ‘Khachaturyan’s relatives claim that the sisters invented everything because they suffer from a sexual disorder.
‘But according to the experts, no such disorder was found in them.’
Maria is being dealt with separately by the legal system and, if convicted, faces time in a psychiatric hospital rather than jail after being judged temporarily insane at the moment her father was killed.
Now the elder sisters are more likely to be seen by the court as acting in self-defence in Russian law.
The case has been seen as a litmus test in Russia for how the law deals with domestic sexual abuse with almost one million signing petitions calling for the sisters to go free.
In March, it was revealed that a new posthumous trial, in which the powerful Russian Investigative Committee has recognised the sisters as ‘victims’, will take place in the abuse allegations against Khachaturyan.
Angelina Khachaturyan’s lawyer Maria Davtyan welcomed the move.
She said at the time: ‘They are in fact victims because of the actions committed against them’.
The long-running abuse they faced, Davtyan added, was ‘the reason the girls were forced to do what they did.
The investigation earlier found they faced ‘physical and mental suffering…over a long period of time’.
Evidence showed the father threatened one of his ‘terrified’ daughters: ‘You will take the place of your mother.
‘I will marry you and you will give birth to my baby.’
An experts’ report said: ‘He ordered them to get undressed in front of him, saying that he wanted to ‘check’ them.
‘Then ordered them to masturbate him, saying that he had problems with his prostate and it would be a cure.’
He ‘abused and humiliated’ them ‘with various weapons’.
Angelina had blood streaming from her face after one attack by her father who had links both to senior Russian officials and underworld kings, say reports.
But the sisters’ aunt Naira Khachaturyan claimed the earlier official investigation found no evidence of sexual violence against the teenagers.
Medical tests showed two of the three were virgins, she claimed, while the third had a secret boyfriend.
‘They knew they could live the way they wanted if they got rid of their father,’ she told a TV programme.
They wanted to ‘delete him from their lives’ and enjoy a ‘riotous lifestyle’.