A gang of alleged Satanist cannibals has been accused of dismembering and eating four Russian teenagers in a series of gruesome cult killings.

The remains of a 16-year-old boy and three girls aged 16 and 17 were discovered in a pit near the home of the alleged ringleader in the Yaroslavl region. The remains of a rat tied to an upturned cross marked the spot where they had been executed.

The eight suspected killers told police that they had stabbed their victims 666 times, in line with Satanic ritual, before cooking parts of their flesh over a bonfire to eat. Investigators found tufts of hair from the teenagers, in the ashes of the fire.

The victims, Varya Kuzmina, Anya Gorokhova, Olga Pukhova and Andrei Sorokin, were lured to their deaths in the woods after being plied with alcohol in a cemetery close to the home of the alleged gang leader Nikolai Ogolobyak.

They had apparently been singled out by the Satanists because they were fans of "Goth" music and fashion. One of the girls was said to have had a document titled "101 rules of Satanism" among her belongings.

The gang told police that their newest member, a 19-year-old university student, was coated in the blood of their victims as an initiation ceremony. The group then lit a fire and ate body parts before burying the dismembered remains.

The victims all went missing in June but police in Yaroslavl did not discover their remains until last month. They initially arrested four men and a woman, who led them to three others, including a man who had checked himself into a local psychiatric hospital.

The man, Anton Makovkin, allegedly claimed that Satan would help him to escape responsibility because he had made "many sacrifices to him". Another gang member, Alexander Voronov, told police in a statement that they had visited a cemetery in 2006 and dug up a fresh grave to eat the heart of a girl buried there.

The same group had also crucified a cat and attacked graves and crosses in the cemetery earlier this year before killing the teenagers. Police discovered the remains after learning that the victims had all made telephone calls to Mr Ogolobyak, a former church choirboy who called himself The Count.

Russia has a history of gruesome killings. The so-called "chessboard killer" Alexander Pichushkin was convicted of 48 murders and three attempted murders last October after he told a court that he had wanted to kill enough people to fill all 64 squares on a chessboard.

He claimed to have murdered 63 people in a bid to overtake the country's worst serial killer, the notorious "Rostov ripper" Andrei Chikatilo, who was executed by firing squad in 1994 for the deaths of 52 women and children.

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