A former Russian police officer has been sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of murdering 19 women in Siberia.
The Novosibirsk Regional Court announced Yevgeny Chuplinsky's sentence on March 6, six days after a jury found him guilty of killing 19 women between 1998 and 2005.
Prosecutors said that the majority of Chuplinsky's victims were prostitutes and that he had sexual relations with some of them before killing them.
He was initially detained in 2004 but managed to escape from a police station. He was arrested again in 2006 but was released because of lack of evidence.
Chuplinsky, 52, was rearrested in 2016 after DNA tests that authorities said proved his involvement in the killings.
In January, former police officer Mikhail Popkov, who had been sentenced to life in prison for murdering 22 women, went on trial again, charged with the killing of an additional 60 women.
The second trial of Popkov, 53, who used to be a police officer in the Siberian city of Angarsk, began at the Irkutsk Regional Court in southeastern Siberia on January 10.
Popkov has been dubbed the Angarsk Maniac by Russian media.
In 1992, Andrei Chikatilo was convicted of raping, butchering, and in some cases cannibalizing as many as 52 people. He was executed in 1994.
There has not been an execution under Russia's judicial system since 1996 when then-President Boris Yeltsin established an implicit moratorium on the death penalty.
An explicit moratorium was established by Russia's Constitutional Court in 1999 and reaffirmed in 2009.
