The 30-year-old, who hasn't been named, was wanted by police after disappearing from his post on the Kamchatka peninsula in 2004, a year after being conscripted, the Tass news agency reports . He was subsequently declared dead after family members "identified" his body in the months after he deserted, and the case was closed. But officers finally caught up with him, alive and living in a forest, after residents of a local village called them about a "suspicious inhabitant" who had settled nearby, the NTV channel says