MOSCOW: When the magic is gone from a marriage in Russia, a bottle of vodka can be enough to resolve the problem — permanently, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

Contract killings of spouses “have long since become more common than contract killings of businessmen and criminals in many parts of the country,” the Novye Izvestia daily Thursday quoted a police investigator as saying.

While one woman was arrested on Wednesday in southern Moscow for ordering the murder of her husband for $3,000, “often relatives will become hitmen for free,” the investigator was quoted as saying.

“The fee for the murder could be a bottle of vodka, or else money, or a share of the victim’s business or real estate.” Director of the Legal Psychological Aid Centre Mikhail Vinogradov said most of the hits were ordered by “mistresses or wives who married for money.”

The most notorious such case in recent years came in 2004, when beauty queen Anastasiya Nasinovskaya, then 21, was convicted of ordering the murder of her lover, Moscow businessman Igor Lantsov, with 15,000 dollars of his own money.

Not one to hold a grudge, Lantsov married Nasinovksaya after she was released with a five-year suspended sentence.—AFP