Husband cuts off Wife’s hands over alleged cheating

A Russian woman, Margarita, who had both her hands axed off by her jealous husband has told how he 'calmly' carried out the sickening attack.  Dmitry Grachyov was convinced his 25-year-old wife Margarita had cheated on him after she demanded a divorce.  

He drove her to a forest, outside of Moscow on 11 December, after lulling her into a false sense of security that he accepted her wish to end their marriage and jointly raise their two young sons.

He bound her so she couldn't run and forced her onto her knees with her arms on a tree stump before chopping of her hands, and was ecstatic after severing her limbs. 

First, he battered her fingers with the axe - 'he was totally calm when he did this to me,' Margarita recalled.

'Unfortunately, I felt all the pain very much. I was dreaming that I would faint. I kept thinking all the time, why am I not fainting? When he raised his axe, I just closed my eyes, I didn't look at it… (when my hands were chopped off). At one moment, I started rolling off the stump and he cut my thigh with the axe – I have scars there too.'

'I still can't understand how this could happen. I've lived with him for so many years.'

Until she had demanded a divorce, he was not violent.

'Then something flipped in his mind. 'This is something from Medieval times, inconceivable, unreal, it just could not happen,' she told Moskovsky Komsomoletsnewspaper.

'I think he had read somewhere about this exact sort of torture. He acted very cleverly, he even tied up my arms before the attack in the right way and in certain places in order to prevent a huge loss of blood.'

After the attack, he picked up her severed hands and bundled her back in the car.

'Only when he had chopped off my wrists and was driving me to the hospital, he kept repeating - 'What adrenalin! What adrenalin!' – and he said it with real delight in his voice. Once on the way he checked my pulse, he was making sure that I was alive.

'But apart from that, he kept telling me on the way to hospital that I should wait for him to come out of jail, or he would cut off the hands of my relatives.'

She gets notes from him via his friends.

'He asks me to forgive him but says that he will kill me if I don't wait for him when he is jail. He seriously thinks that now he has punished me, we have a hope of a happy life in future.

'I just don't understand how he pictures this in his mind. This is what I am afraid most of all. His threats are real. Before, he threatened to pour acid on me or to hurt me in some other ways. He kept his word. I don't have any kind of protection.'

She is refusing to speak to him or his relatives.

'I don't have any words left for him. I am trying to forget this story and to think positively about the future,' she said.

She has denied cheating on her husband.

One of her hands has been successfully sewn back on and surgeons say she will have 70 per cent use of it.

'Still, it is my hand, I will hug my children with it,' she said.

She will also have an artificial right hand fitted.