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It sounds like the sick storyline from a Hollywood horror film. Four homeless men stagger into a remote forest clearing in the dead of night.

The flickering firelight casts eerie shadows across a makeshift stone table. Yet there is no sign of the cheap vodka they were promised to warm them against the freezing cold.

Slowly the truth starts to dawn on them. That is no table, it’s an altar, and their new friend who promised them free bottles of booze has a far more sinister plan.

One by one they are sacrificed on the altar by the light of the bonfire before satanic rituals are performed on their mutilated bodies.

These are the appalling murders allegedly carried out by Arsen Bairambekov, a former police officer, outside the remote Russia town of Verkhnyaya Pysmha, 900 miles east of Moscow.

Bairambekov is accused of burying the bodies, then returning “some time later” to dig them up, believing the sacrifices had given him the occult powers of a necromancer .

It is said he planned to use his victims to build his own zombie army .

Investigators in the case said: “He tried to bring the dead back to life and turn them into zombies. However, all his attempts were futile.”

Bairambekov is clearly not your average police officer. He is also charged with dealing firearms and assassinating two businessmen in 2002 and 2010.

But he cannot simply be dismissed as criminally insane. A psychiatric evaluation ruled he was fit to stand trial and he was canny enough to plea bargain with prosecutors to ensure he faces a maximum jail sentence of just 12 years, despite his horrific crimes.

Instead Bairambekov’s killing spree is the latest in a long list of crimes inspired by Russia’s deadly obsession with the occult, which stretches back hundreds of years.

There are reportedly 400,000 professional occultists in Russia, fuelling a black magic black market worth £24billion a year.

It is a growing worry for the authorities. As recently as 2008 the Russian interior ministry warned satanism was a bigger threat to national security than Islamic extremism.

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In the same year a devil worshipping gang of cannibals murdered four teenagers, stabbing them each 666 times – a number that is revered by Satanists.

Anya Gorokhova, Olga Pukhova, Varya Kuzmina, and Andrei Sorokin, all aged 16 or 17, went missing from their homes in the Russian Yaroslavl region, 300 miles north east of Moscow.

Police believe the teenagers were forced to drink alcohol before they were attacked. They were then hacked to pieces, their body parts roasted over a fire before and eaten by the cult.

Police found the remains in a pit 250m from cult leader Nikolai Ogolobyak’s apartment. They also found the body of a small rodent crucified upside down on a cross nearby.

A total of eight people were arrested. One told police: “Satan will help me to avoid responsibility. I made lots of sacrifices to him.”

Another claimed to have previously dug up the body of a girl and eaten her heart.

When a third was asked why he did it, he said: “I tried to turn to God, but it didn’t bring me any money. I prayed to Satan and things improved.”

There were also a spate of high profile cases in the late 1990s.

Satanic students burned down the Church of the Holy Trinity in the Russian city of Brest in 1995. The following year The Russian Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit in Minsk was desecrated by cultists. They smeared the religious icons black and painted the walls with blasphemous words, Satanic symbols, and threats to “annihilate” Christians.

A satanist was arrested for a ritualist murder in Minks in 1996. He did not deny his guilt and confessed he had prepared for his horrific crime by executing 666 cats.

And a teenage cult were arrested in the Crimean city of Simferopoi after police found the dismembered body of a young woman at the city cemetery, together with vandalised graves.

(Image: Getty)

One of those arrested confessed to practising Satanism for several years, including removing the skull and bones from two graves to perform “magic rites” and stealing metal plates from headstones to make knives to perform evil rituals.

Even more disturbing, police in Saransk, a city in central Russia, warned a devil worshipping cult had encouraged its members to join the force to extend its evil influence in 2010. It is not know how many satanists were successful in infiltrating the police and whether any, like Bairambekov, have used their position to carry out horrific crimes.

That has sparked fears of Russia returning to the dark days of the early 20th century when occultists infiltrated the innermost corridors of power and wielded influence over the Tsar himself.

There was a French ‘sage’ called Monsieur Philippe, who held seances to help the royal family contact the dead and prayed with the Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra.

But the most famous was the mystic monk Grigori Rasputin. Born to a peasant family in the frozen wilds of Siberia, it was said he could read minds and heal animals by the time he was 10.

Rasputin joined a Russian Orthodox cult that believed its members needed to experience sin, which suited his love of drinking and violent sex with society women at Moscow bath houses.

Eventually Rasputin captured the attention of the last Tsar Nicholas II’s wife Alexandra by supposedly healing her son Alexei Nikolaevich’s life-threatening haemophilia, his body’s inability to make his blood clot when he cut himself, where the doctors had failed.

There are numerous theories on how he did this, from hypnotising the young prince, to giving him herbs, or simply advising his mother not to let the doctors bother him too much.

Others believe Rasputin took a more devious approach, using inside information leaked by Alexandra’s lady-in-waiting to time his treatments for when the prince was already on the road to recovery and claiming the credit.

Certainly the Tsar Nicholas II was less than impressed by Rasputin’s work, but he dared not dismiss him for fear of upsetting his wife.

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Historian Pierre Gilliard observed: “He did not like to send Rasputin away for, if Alexei had died, in the eyes of the mother he would have been the murderer of his own son.”

Whatever influence Rasputin really had over the Tsar and his wife, the people feared he had led them astray. After numerous failed assassination attempts he was finally murdered in December 1916 and dumped in the river Neva, where his body was trapped beneath the ice for two months.

His killers hope that by doing so they would save the Romanov royal dynasty. But public support for the Tsar was not critically low, stoking the flames of the Russian Revolution in 1917.

The idea that the Russian royal family had turned to the occult to help them rule the country may have caused outrage and contributed to their downfall, but many Russians are still happy to embrace it as part of their own lives.

The collapse of the Soviet system in the 1980s led to such a surge in occult beliefs that one in five Russians has seen a psychic or mystic at least once.

They offer to help with all areas of life, from health to wealth and romance. Witches will cast a “returning” spell to bring back a lover, or a charm to help an alcoholic relative back on track.

They will also ward off the evil eye, or even bewitch a company’s entire bookkeeping department to supposedly increase their clients’ salaries and ensure loan applications are approved.

Successful businessmen even admit to using clairvoyants to help them make vital business deals.

After the fall of Communism these psychic healers were even given a public platform by the Kremlin and were beamed into every home on Russia on state-owned television stations on the authority of President Boris Yeltsin, who was captivated by the paranormal.

The most successful was Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a former weightlifter turned psychiatrist and psychic dubbed “the new Rasputin” who, at the height of his fame, regularly beat Yeltsin into second place in public popularity polls before claims that his show caused a wave of suicides.

His great rival was Alan Chumak, a white haired figure who would claimed to charge jars of water in his viewers’ homes with the power to healing everything from allergies to stomach pains.

Yeltsin also approved a number of bizarre projects, hiring psychics to work for the security agencies, funding schemes to extract energy from stones, and employing 127 psychics to spend weeks searching for a passenger plane that disappeared in east Russia in December 1995.

The wreckage was eventually found in a matter of hours when the authorities began using their radar systems instead of relying on the supernatural.

However, the days of state sponsored psychics seem to be over, as the Russian parliament has introduced new laws to stop mystics advertising their supernatural services in the mass media.

Dispelling Russia’s obsession with the occult may prove rather more difficult.