Mother who witnessed beheading of 8-month-old baby gets 25 years in jail, killer to be shot by firing squad

A 26-year-old mother, who witnessed her 8-month-old child being brutally beaten and beheaded by her 48-year-old accomplice, has lost her appeal against a maximum prison sentence, and now faces 25 years of imprisonment.

While her killer accomplice, identified as Viktar Syarhel, also lost his Supreme Court appeal in Belarus against a death sentence and is now set to be executed by a firing squad.

The child’s mother, Natalya Kolb, was reportedly drinking with friend Syarhel at her apartment when the latter committed the heinous act while she watched. The baby, identified as Hanna, had 46 separate injuries on her body and was killed with a kitchen knife. The child’s bloodied body was discovered by Kolb’s husband Leonid Kolb, who came home with the couple’s two other children, two boys aged four and six, and saw his daughter’s severed head and a pool of blood, according to the Daily Mail.

“He saw a scene out of the horror movies,” a neighbor, while talking to reporters, said of the father. “The ambulance doctor fainted when she came in.” The neighbors living near the family’s home recounted that the couple was “happy” and they had even recently baptized the child in the Orthodox Church.

The pair were subsequently arrested and sentenced in October 2019. The closed-door session of Brest Regional Court ruled that the murder was carried out with “particular cruelty” and that the baby was badly beaten before being murdered.

By law, only men in Belarus can face capital punishment. Those facing the death penalty are blindfolded and forced to kneel, and then they are shot in the back of the head. Over 400 men have been executed in a similar manner in Belarus since the country became independent after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Death penalty verdicts in Belarus in recent times have sparked debates with a large population in the country being opposed to it. President Alexander Lukashenko, however, last year had indicated that death penalties will continue to be the ultimate punishment for criminals.