A twisted historian who lived with the mummified corpses of 26 young girls that he dressed as dolls will remain locked in a psychiatric hospital until at least November.

The latest court ruling was made in Nizhny Novgorod city in central Russia, where Anatoly Moskvin has been held since his arrest in 2011.

The Leninsky District Court confirmed on 7th May that the term of his forced detention has been extended following a petition from the chief physician of Psychiatric Hospital No. 2.

Moskvin, now 58, first came to public attention in 2011 when a series of desecrated graves of girls aged three to 11 led to a months-long manhunt across the region.

Police eventually tracked him down after unseasonably dry weather preserved his footprints near one of the graves.

When they searched the flat he shared with his parents on Lenin Avenue, officers discovered the bodies of 26 girls.

Each had been mummified, dressed in children’s clothes, and arranged like dolls in his home.

The former academic later claimed that he practised black magic and believed he could one day revive the children using science.

He told investigators: "I felt sorry for the dead children, who could still live on. So I kept them until the time when science would have advanced, and revived them."

Moskvin added that he had needed biological material for cloning and insisted his actions were not for any sexual motive.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he was ruled unfit to stand trial in 2012 and has been held in a secure psychiatric unit ever since.

In the early years after his arrest, he frequently gave interviews and made bizarre confessions, including that he had slept in Muslim graveyards and visited more than 750 cemeteries.

He claimed: "I lay down in one coffin, and slid another one on top. And I got a good night's sleep. And no one noticed."

Reports said that Moskvin had never had a girlfriend and was a virgin when arrested, though he later began communicating with a young philology student who reportedly wanted to marry him.

In 2021, his lawyers tried to argue that he should be transferred to outpatient care and had plans to write a book and work as a language teacher in Moscow.

They said the self-described "mad genius," who speaks 13 languages and was once respected for his work on Celtic burial rites, had recovered after years of treatment.

But the court rejected the plea, as it did again last week.

Despite earlier reports in August 2022 suggesting he could be freed, following a court declaration of legal incompetency, that ruling did not result in his release.

Instead, the court again sided with the hospital that he remain under psychiatric supervision in detention until 7th November.