Pichushkin (AFP)

Moscow, Oct. 24 (AP): A Russian man who claimed he wanted to record a murder for eve-ry square on a chessboard was found guilty today of killing 48 people in Moscow.

A jury took less than three hours to convict Alexander Pichushkin of the murders, most of which occurred over five years in a sprawling park in southern Moscow. He was also found guilty of three attempted murders.

The judge, Vladimir Usov, read the verdict for one hour while 33-year-old Pichushkin, inside a reinforced glass cage, leaned against the wall and stared at the floor.

Prosecutors recommended that the judge sentence Pich-ushkin to life imprisonment, with the first 15 years to be sp-ent in isolation given the ma-’s violent nature. The judge was expected to set a date for sentencing.

Russia has imposed a mor-atorium on the death sentence but has not abolished it.

Most of Pichushkin’s victims were killed in Bittsa Pa-rk, and the serial killer beca-me known as the “Bittsa Maniac” and the “chessboard murderer”.

Pichushkin boasted of killing 63 — one short of filling up the chessboard — but prosecutors were able to find evidence only for 48 murders.

Prosecutors said Pichush-kin lured his victims — many of them homeless — to the park by promising them vodka if they would join him in mourning the death of his dog. They say he killed 11 people in 2001.

Beginning in 2005, he beg-an to kill with “particular cruelty,” hitting his intoxicated victims multiple times in the head with a hammer, then sticking an unfinished bottle of vodka into their shattered skulls, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said on Monday that Pichushkin had admitted killing one of his last victims in February 2006 to demonstrate that he was still at large following inaccurate reports in Russian newspapers that the Bittsa Maniac had been caught.