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Former Police Forensic Expert Serhiy Tkach Gets Life in Ukraine for Killings That Sent Innocent People to Prison

A Dnipropetrovsk appeals court jailed the man called the Polohy maniac after a trial of nearly a year. Police put his victims at about 80.

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Illustration of a television camera operator filming an empty defendant's cage in a plain Ukrainian courtroom. Not an actual scene from the case.

For more than 20 years, former police forensic expert Serhiy Tkach raped and killed girls and young women in Ukraine while innocent people were jailed for his crimes. On December 23, 2008, a court sentenced him to life.

A panel of the Appellate Court of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, presided over by Judge Serhiy Voloshko, delivered the verdict after a trial lasting nearly a year, Radio Svoboda reported. The case was slowed in part by a psychiatric examination ordered after Tkach behaved erratically at some hearings, but doctors found him mentally sound and responsible for his actions. Relatives of those he killed, and some who survived his attacks, attended the hearings. The court found him guilty of 36 murders and attempted murders, according to a later report by Pravo.ru, and he received life because Ukraine had a moratorium on the death penalty. Law enforcement put his victims at about 80, in the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, over nearly a quarter of a century.

Nine innocent people served sentences for crimes Tkach committed, and one of them took his own life. Tkach, born in Russia's Kemerovo region in 1952, had trained at a police school before moving to Ukraine. He was arrested in August 2005 in Polohy, in the Zaporizhzhia region, where he was living. In 2009, a court considered 10 more murders and rapes and sentenced him to life a second time. He died in 2018.

Pravo.ru reported that the 2008 verdict covered 36 murders and attempted murders, while the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group said his guilt was established in 37 cases.

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