HIV-positive maniacs terrorize Russia

In Ekaterinburg, an HIV-positive man attacks people and makes them injections of his blood

A maniac with a syringe continues to terrorize citizens of Ekaterinburg. The last incident took place on Sunday night, when a man dressed in black clothes entered a drug store and attacked a woman. The woman said that she felt stinging pain in a hip. When the woman turned around, she saw a young man walking away, but she could not look close at the attacker.

Five people have come to the regional Anti-AIDS center during the last week of October. All the people told medical specialists that they had been attacked by a tall young man. The man pricked them with a syringe and escaped. Specialists of the center took the victims' blood samples to either confirm or reject the HIV infection.

It was not the first incident of the kind in Ekaterinburg. It was rumored about two years ago that a group of HIV-infected drug addicts declared war on city's residents. Supposedly, the group had a goal to distribute the lethal infection in the city. They tried to infect people with the use of sharp items on which blood traces of HIV-infected individuals were left.

The police of Ekaterinburg are searching for the unidentified criminal who wounds people with a syringe.

Rumors about a HIV-positive maniac appeared in the city of Veliki Novgorod in the spring of 2003. It was said that an unidentified man was infecting others with HIV in public transport. Two young girls addressed to a local medical center and said that someone pricked them with a needle in a bus. The girls thought that it was a HIV-infected maniac, about whom they had heard on TV, but the analysis of their blood samples showed negative results. Surgeon General of the Novgorod region, Alexander Pugovkin, said that even a blood-stained needle would not be enough to infect a person with HIV.