Ukraine nabs serial killer

By Aussiegirl

No country is immune to these pathological predators it seems.

World Crises | Reuters.com

KIEV, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Police have arrested a Russian man suspected of killing about 30 young girls who have disappeared over more than two decades, a senior official was quoted as saying.

Deputy Interior Minister Hennady Moskal, addressing journalists on Saturday, said the suspect had been detained in the Zaporizha region in eastern Ukraine.

Moskal, quoted by Ukrainian media, said the man moved from Siberia to Ukraine in 1982, settling in the Dnipropetrovsk region, also in the east of what was then the second most populous republic in the Soviet Union.

Criminal records showed a series of disappearances of young girls in the region dating from 1983 and blamed on the "Pavlograd killer" -- a reference to a major industrial town.

That prompted the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee to launch an investigation, but no one was ever charged.

Moskal said the suspect later moved to Zaporizha further south, where more disappearances were recorded.

He said the man, detained after the murder last week of a 10-year-old girl, was being questioned and had confessed to a number of cases.

Ukraine's most notorious mass murderer, Anatoly Onoprienko, was convicted in 1999 of murdering 52 people, including entire families, while travelling across the country by train.

He was sentenced to death but spared when Ukraine abolished the death penalty a year later.