SEVERED HANDS WASH UP ON RUSSIAN ISLAND

   The sinister discovery is ‘not criminal’ says the Investigative Committee, claiming the limbs were wrongly disposed of by a forensic lab.
   The hands, severed at the wrist, were found on an island in the Amur, close to Khabarovsk, some 30 kilometres downstream from the Chinese border.  

 But now the Investigative Committee, which probes serious crimes in Russia, suggests there was nothing abnormal in storing severed hands - only in the way they were disposed of.
It says that ‘these biological items (human hands) do not have a criminal background’ - yet it gave little extra detail.
  This appears to allude to a little-known procedure in Russia to cut the hands off unknown corpses as a means of retaining fingerprints if needed after burial.