Man held as missing US woman’s body found in Russia

Russian police have arrested a man after the body of a missing American student was found near the city of Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow.

Catherine Serou, 34, went missing after getting into an unidentified car.

Her last communication was a text sent to her mother in Mississippi in which she said: “In a car with a stranger. I hope I’m not being abducted.”

The arrested man had a long record of “especially grave crimes”, Russian investigators said.

Ms Serou was a former US Marine who had completed a tour in Afghanistan and moved to Russia in 2019 to study for a master’s degree in law at Nizhny Novgorod’s Lobachevsky State University.

She lived just outside the city, which is 420km (260 miles) east of Moscow, and texted her mother just after 18:30 local time (15:30 GMT) on Tuesday.

Her mother Beccy Serou told US media on Friday that her daughter had been in a hurry to return to a clinic where a payment had not gone through and may have hitched a lift with a passing car instead of waiting for her Uber.

Search teams had been looking for her body in a forested area outside the city where her phone signal was last detected.

The US embassy in Moscow said it had confirmed Ms Serou’s death and was following the Russian investigation.

Ms Serou had planned to return to the US to work as an immigration lawyer and had been enjoying her time in Russia, her mother told NPR. She had sold a flat in California to fund her studies there.

The pair had not seen each other for two years but spoke every day on the phone.

“She enjoyed Nizhny Novgorod so much, she loved her life in a Russian family, her friends at the university,” Beccy Serou told The Daily Beast.