A court in the Siberian city of Irkutsk has sentenced a former police officer to life in prison for killing 22 women — most of them while he served in local law enforcement.
The killing spree took place between 1994 and 2000 in the Siberian town of Angarsk, where Mikhail Popkov, now 50, served as a police officer until his resignation in 1998, the Interfax news agency reported Wednesday.
Dozens of women went missing in Angarsk during that period, apparently abducted from public areas in the evening or at nighttime. Their bodies, usually naked and with signs of rape, were later found around local forests, at cemeteries or by the roadside, the report said.
DNA tests led investigators to Popkov, who was detained in 2012 in the far-eastern city of Vladivostok and escorted to Angarsk, the report said.
The Irkutsk Regional Court on Wednesday found him guilty of murdering 22 women and of the attempted murder of two other women.
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