News

A court has recognized the evidence gathered by the Sebastopol office of the Investigative Committee as sufficient to convict Pavel Bondarenko, 35. He was found guilty of four sexual homicides, three sexual assaults, one attempted sexual assault, two larcenies and sex crimes.

The investigators revealed, that the man committed a serious of murders and rapes of women in Nakhimovsky, Leninsky and Gagarinsky districts of Sebastopol from 2009 to 2016.

Dead body of a 20-year-old university student was found in Victory Park on 23 December 2014. The young woman had been choked at nighttime at a bus stop. a 37-year-old woman was killed under similar circumstances in Khrustalyov Street in Leninsky district on 1 September 2015. Some jewelry had been stolen from the woman.

Investigating the crimes of 2014 and 2015, employees of the Investigative Committee's Forensic Directorate together with criminalists of the Sebastopol Office dug into all unsolved murders committed in previous years. They divided them into categories of place and way of murder, characteristics of victims, studied thoroughly each one of the crimes. New forensic tests were run for the majority of the cases unsolved by Ukrainian authorities using advanced techniques and forensic equipment not available in Sebastopol at the time.

Special attention was paid to the murder of a 60-year-old woman committed by a similar way under similar circumstances on 17 January 2009 at a bus stop in Admiral Makarov Street in Nakhimovsky district: the attacker struck late in the evening, beat and raped the woman, and then strangled her. The attacker stole from her a silver cross on a chain and her cell phone.  The laboratory of the Forensic Directorate ran a DNA test of the traces found at the murder scene. Using cutting-edge forensic equipment genetics specialists of the Investigative Committee's Central Office found traces and layers of a person that had not been discovered in 2009. The similar DNA was found on the scenes of the two crimes mentioned above. The investigators once again checked all the people who had gotten attention of Ukrainian investigators in 2009.

On 21 January 2016, the investigators with the assistance of Berkut special force and agents of the crime detection department of the Sebastopol Office of the Interior Ministry detained resident of Sebastopol Pavel Bondarenko, 35, a quiet and unremarkable man, a model family man, employed in construction, with no previous convictions. In 2009, during the investigation in the murder of the 60-year-old woman he had been a person of interest, but had been released due to the lack of evidence.

After the accused was detained, the investigators found that he had committed the fourth murder of a 26-year-old woman on 16 December 2010 in Prospekt Pobedy in Nakhimovsky District of Sebastopol. All of the murders the man had committed under the influence of alcohol.

The accused gave himself, during check of his statements at crime scenes he showed and told the investigators details of the murders.

The suspect was detained as a result of committed work done by the investigators of the Investigative Committee in conjunction with the Interior Ministry’s Sebastopol Office to solve the crimes committed in previous years.

The court has sentenced Bondarenko to life imprisonment in a super-maximum security facility.