Russian teen claims to be serial killer

MOSCOW, May 28 (UPI) -- An 18-year-old Moscow skinhead claims he was racially motivated when he killed 37 people to "clean up the city."

But authorities, who pegged the number killed at 32, told Regnum.ru the presumed motive was robbery, The Moscow Times reported Monday on its Web site.

The Moscow newspaper Vremya Novostei reported the suspect, Artur Ryno, is a student at an icon painting school, who allegedly told investigators he started his killing spree Aug. 21, 2006 -- the day 13 people were killed by a bomb in Moscow's Cherkizovsky market. Ryno said he and a group of skinheads started a fight that day with a group of people from central Asia and that he stabbed one immigrant to death.

Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for the Moscow prosecutor's office, said only that details would be available "sometime next week."

Ryno and fellow student Pavel Skachayevsky, 18, were arrested last month in the stabbing death of an Armenian businessman.