A court in Russia handed six self-styled Satanists jail sentences of up to 20 years yesterday for ritually killing and then dismembering four teenagers in a forest.

The six – who were all teenagers at the time of the crime – reportedly also ate the body parts of their victims in a wooded area outside the city of Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow.

The group were found guilty of “murdering four people with the aim of carrying out an initiation ritual into a sect and of desecrating the bodies of the dead”, the Yaroslavl regional court said in a statement.

The group, four of whom were minors at the time, killed the four teenagers in June 2008, prosecutors said, the Interfax news agency reported. They then desecrated the bodies and stole their possessions.

The dismembered bodies of the teenagers, were found buried in the forest in August that year.

The accused were found guilty of murder, while four were found guilty of desecrating the victims’ bodies. The longest sentence of 20 years went to the man named as the group’s leader, Nikolai Ogolobyak.

The members of the gang called themselves Satanists and earlier carried out animal sacrifices, Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported, citing investigators.

They stabbed the victims and then dismembered their bodies and cooked and ate some body parts, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.

The gang members included one woman, Ksenya Kovalyova, who was sentenced to eight years in jail.

Another member, Andrei Makovkin, nicknamed “Doctor Goth” was convicted of murder but pronounced insane and sentenced to compulsory psychiatric treatment.

He attended court with his dark shirt unbuttoned over a bare chest, with his hair hanging over his face, and was shown grabbing a microphone through the bars of his enclosure and throwing it on the ground.

The accused were shown hiding their faces with hoods as they went into the court, with one wearing a medical facemask.

“What they have carried out does not fit into normal human thinking, because it is horrific,” a prosecutor, Tatyana Rachinskaya, said in televised comments after the sentencing.