A notorious Soviet cannibal killer nicknamed ‘Iron Fang’ for his metal crowns is speaking lucidly for the first time in four decades, say reports. Blood-drinking Nikolai Dzhumagaliev, now 73, is held in a high-security psychiatric hospital in Kazakhstan.

The schizophrenic cannibal, blamed for the murders of at least 10 people, has allegedly been allowed to call his family for the first time in 35 years, after doctors said his condition had stabilised.

He “regained consciousness” and is suddenly lucid, “communicating normally”.

Doctors say he has “begun to feel significantly better” after a new treatment approach.

He will now be allowed to speak twice a month by phone to his niece, reported SHOT media in Russia.

Former firefighter Dzhumagaliev’s crimes which began in 1979 were long shrouded in Soviet-era secrecy — and, even now, his name still sends shudders across the old USSR, not least because of his escape in 1989 when he was on the run for 18 months.

In chilling footage of him in 1991 after he was recaptured in Soviet Uzbekistan when he was caught stealing sheep, he says: “I’m already in hospital, in [capital city] Tashkent. I’ve fully come to terms with my past.”

His known victims were all female, and investigators and forensic psychiatrists concluded he was a targeted, bestial, misogynistic serial killer, not an indiscriminate attacker.

He fed on the flesh of his first victim for about a month -“boiling it, frying it, salting it, and also making cutlets and dumplings”.
He “served human remains to guests”.

Among his victims were a mother and daughter.

Dzhumagaliev supposedly developed a deep hostility towards women after contracting sexually transmitted infections, coming to see them as “impure” and morally corrupt.

He told investigators he was “taking revenge” on the female sex and attempting to “understand” women’s bodies through extreme violence. His schizophrenia fused with occult beliefs, leading him to see murder as ritual sacrifice.

He drank victims’ blood, believing it would grant supernatural powers, dismembered bodies for symbolic reasons, and timed killings to emotionally significant dates, according to Soviet experts. Dzhumagaliev, who claimed he was descended from Genghis Khan and was labelled a ‘Soviet Hannibal Lecter’, was found not criminally responsible due to schizophrenia and sent for psychiatric confinement rather than prison.

Profilers described him as driven by male dominance fantasies, ritualism and sexual resentment — a combination that made women both his exclusive target and the focus of his delusions.

There were two scares that he was on the loose in Moscow. After his escape in 1989, paper Kuranty warned readers in a headline of a ‘Cannibal in Moscow’.Another scare came in 2016, although this was a false alarm of an escape.