In the Russian Truth is Stranger than Fiction Department, the Moscow Times reports:

Moscow region prosecutors have asked the police to reinvestigate the death of a cat whose owners say he was catnapped and killed by rabbit-breeding neighbors at their dacha, near the town of Ruza. An official with the Moscow Region Prosecutor's Office, who refused to give her name, said the request had been made after animal rights organization Vita had asked them to look into the death of the animal, named Motya. "We took our cat to the dacha, and our neighbors, who are very strange people, killed him," said the cat's owner, Yulia Ilyukhina, 29. She said the neighbors suspected the cat of attacking their rabbits. Ilyukhina said Motya was lying in the sun on Aug. 5 when the neighbors -- Viktor Martynenko, his daughter Tatyana Klychnikova and her husband, Alexander Klychnikov -- raced up in their Lada and snatched the cat. "He was sitting in the sun, dreaming. He was very friendly -- you could just walk up and pet him," Ilyukhina said. "They grabbed the cat and drove away. They were driving very fast." She said the neighbors had also accused the cat of keeping their child awake. Ilyukhina said Martynenko had threatened to kill Motya with a stick. "If the rabbit is bigger than the cat, how could he attack it," said Ilyukhina, who added that Motya was less than 2 years old. She said the cat had been kept locked indoors after the neighbors complained. Ilyukhina said the neighbors later returned and dumped the dead cat where it had been laying. When she went to the police, they failed to interview a number of people who had been witnesses and refused to take any further action, Ilyukhina said. Ruza police refused to comment when contacted by telephone. Attempts to reach Martynenko were unsuccessful. An autopsy performed on the cat after the police failed to take any action revealed that Motya died from five to 10 minutes after being hit with a blunt object, Ilyukhina said. Vita president Irina Novozhilovo said very few cases dealing with cruelty to animals actually made it to court. "It depends on people's enthusiasm," she said, adding that cases only make it to the court after people continue to complain when the police turn them down. In a high-profile case that did make it to court, the owner of an American Staffordshire terrier was sentenced last year to one year of community service after he set the dog loose on a on a group of stray puppies. His dog killed two of the puppies and the man killed another two himself.