If you can’t quite determine what you’re looking at we’ll make it clear for you—it’s a pile of severed hands. Fifty-four of them, in fact, which were found in a large bag in Russia yesterday on an island in the Amur River near Khabarovsk, close to the border with China.
The second photo, below, shows the hands organized into twenty-seven matched pairs by some unlucky member of the investigative team. It’s this detail of the story that fascinates us. How did they match the hands? We would think all severed frozen hands look pretty much the same, and since fingerprints take time to process we can only guess the cops had someone along who was able to sort them out the way Dustin Hoffman could sort out scattered matches in Rainman.
Regardless, it has to be taken as moderately good news that twenty-seven rather than fifty-four people were potentially mutilated. Obviously nobody has the slightest idea how or why the hands were out there—though a trending theory has it that they were cut from accused thieves, and others are speculating that they were used for medical research, then bagged and illegally dumped. The second theory may be closer to the truth, since police allegedly found hospital accessories in the bag along with the grisly stash. Well, if medical personnel were responsible someone has clearly jettisoned their professional ethics. Not like that hasn’t happened about a million times before. We suggest that the solution to this mystery could lie in locating a corresponding collection of feet, and if that’s true, we know just where to start looking.
