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Angarsk Court Orders Arrest of a Former Police Officer, Later Named as Mikhail Popkov, in Killings of Women

His DNA matched traces from murdered women after investigators tested owners of Niva cars. He was first charged with three 1997 killings as the inquiry widened.

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Mikhail Popkov, smiling, in a white baseball cap

A series of murders of women around Angarsk, in Siberia, went unsolved for more than a decade. On June 29, 2012, a court there announced the arrest of a former police officer.

The suspect, a retired local man born in 1964 and later named as Mikhail Popkov, had been detained in Vladivostok, where he had gone to buy a car, the Angarsk city court's press service said. He was charged with the rapes and murders of three women in March, June and December 1997, and investigators were examining whether he was involved in the killings of 25 women in Angarsk and the nearby Usolye and Irkutsk districts from 1994 to 2000. Investigators believed the killer had used a Niva car, so they took biological samples from owners of that model, and his DNA matched traces taken from murdered women, the court said.

Former colleagues told Komsomolskaya Pravda that he had begun his police career as an assistant duty officer at Angarsk police department No. 1, made junior lieutenant in 1998 and left the force immediately afterward, and later worked as a private security guard. He was held in Angarsk's pretrial detention center No. 6. In January 2015 the Irkutsk regional court sentenced Popkov to life in prison for murdering 22 women from 1994 to 2000 and for two attempted murders.

The court said in June 2012 that investigators were checking the suspect's link to 25 killings, while Komsomolskaya Pravda reported days later that he was suspected of killing 29 women.

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