Court sentences Kamuoliniai member to 14 years for murder
Thursday 17th September 2026 on 18:00 in
Lithuania
The Kaunas Regional Court has sentenced Klaidas Kanarskas to 14 years in prison for the murder of a young woman 24 years ago, LRT reported, citing the General Prosecutor’s Office.
The murder, which shocked the public, took place in Kaunas in February 2002. Kanarskas was one of the suspects identified and brought to court at the time, but he was acquitted in 2004. Another suspect, Jonas Snieška, had fled abroad.
New significant information emerged nearly 15 years later. In 2019, prosecutors from the General Prosecutor’s Office’s Department for Organised Crime and Corruption Investigation and officers from the Lithuanian Criminal Police Bureau began an intensive investigation into serious crimes allegedly committed by the armed criminal organisation known as Kamuoliniai.
Information gathered during that investigation about killings, attempted killings and other crimes committed by the group’s leaders and members prompted investigators to re-examine previously unsolved crimes, suspended investigations and cases in which courts had acquitted people who may have been responsible.
After checking the information and questioning dozens of people, investigators located Snieška in the United Kingdom in 2021. In a covert international operation carried out with British authorities, he was detained and transferred to Lithuania.
On April 18, 2023, the Supreme Court of Lithuania granted an application by Prosecutor General Nida Grunskienė, annulled Kanarskas’s 2004 acquittal by the Kaunas Regional Court and reopened the case. The Supreme Court said the new circumstances could not have been known to the court that issued the earlier ruling and that the statute of limitations did not prevent proceedings over the intentional taking of a person’s life.
The criminal case was referred to the Kaunas Regional Court on October 21, 2024. On Thursday, the court found Kanarskas guilty of the offences charged and imposed a combined sentence of 14 years in prison, as requested by the prosecutor from the Kaunas Regional Prosecutor’s Office.
The verdict can be appealed to the Court of Appeal of Lithuania.