A police officer has been dismissed after ignoring calls for help from a woman threatened by her husband, whom she reportedly asked for a divorce. As a consequence, the husband mutilated the mother of two by cutting off her hands.

The horrifying incident unfolded in the Serpukhov region outside Moscow earlier this month, when a 26-year-old man drove his wife, who had reportedly asked for a divorce, into the forest where, in an apparent fit of sadistic rage, he tortured her for quite some time.

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Named as Dmitry Grachev in Russian media, the man tormented 25-year-old Margarita for over an hour. He began by using an axe to break her wrists, then started cutting off her fingers one by one before eventually chopping off both of her hands at the wrist so she could not“pat [their] children anymore.”

Dmitry then rushed to a local hospital, with media reporting that he dragged his wife from the back seat of his car and left her there, along with a shoe box containing her fingers and fragments of her right hand. Later, the man turned himself in at a police station, confessing to his deeds. At the crime scene, police discovered the other severed hand, which they delivered to the hospital.

Following extensive surgery, doctors in Moscow eventually managed to reattach one of the hands. Margarita is said to be feeling better, “trying to text with her elbow and move her fingers a little,” according to a group supporting the woman in the Russian social network VKontakte (InContact).

Margarita’s relatives told reporters that Dmitry suspected his wife of infidelity, and that this was not the first time he had staged such an event in a forest. On a previous occasion, he had questioned her about relations with other men while holding a knife to her throat, the Mediazone news outlet reported.

Following that episode, she had tried to reach the local policeman, who reportedly was “on holiday.” Once she filed a complaint, it took some 18 days for the officer to have “a talk” with the jealous husband.

Numerous media reports of police inaction prompted an internal investigation, with the officer and his superintendent eventually getting fired, the Interior Ministry reported Thursday.