On Monday 10th December a court in Siberia convicted a former police officer of raping and killing 56 women, making him Russia’s worst serial killer in the last century.
Mikhail Popkov, 54, terrorised his home city of Angarsk in the Irkutsk region for nearly two decades, luring women into his car late at night and then assaulting them with tools such as axes and shovels.
In 2015, he was sentenced to life for 22 murders.
The conviction appeared to confirm earlier claims by Popkov that he had committed 84 murders, but three were excluded from the case for lack of evidence.
Sources:
