News

In Saint Petersburg, group of persons accused of swindling and murders of socially unprotected citizens to stand trial

The Saint Petersburg Investigations Directorate of the Investigative Committee of Russia has finished the investigation into Zabar Zubov, Gennady Ageev, Victoria Godovikova, Valentina Torochkova, and Viktor Zorin, accused, depending on the role of each, of committing offenses under Paragraphs A, G, H, J of Part 2 of Article 105; Part 1 of Article 30, Part 4 of Article 159; Part 5 of Article 33, Paragraphs G and H of Part 2 of Article 105 of the Criminal Code of Russia (murder, swindling, attempted swindling).

The investigation established that, in 2010, Sergey Krokhin, a district police officer of Kolpinsky District of St. Petersburg, had organized a criminal group in order to commit murders of socially unprotected citizens and take over their apartments.

Krokhin and his accomplices had been finding senior or asocial people owning an apartment, discovering whether they had had legal heirs, and decided upon a murder after analyzing the obtained information. Preferably, they had searched for apartments owned by women that had had a son or a grandson. After the murder of the owner of the apartment, the heir had been urged to enter into a fake marriage with one of the accomplices, and once she had become a legal heir, he had been also murdered.

Krokhin had invented ways of committing murders without leaving signs on the bodies. Ageev, a pensioner of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, had been in charge of legal issues of registering inheritance and sold the apartments. Zubov and Zorin had been directly engaged in committing the offenses while Torochkova and Godovikova had been entering into fake marriages with victims.

According to investigative data, from August 2010 to March 2015, the accomplices had committed four murders and two episodes of swindling.

The criminal case into Krokhin, having signed an immunity agreement pre-trial, is being reviewed by the court; probes into Zorin, Zubov, Ageev, Godovikova, and Torochkova have been also sent to the court to be tried on the merits.

It must be noted that former district police officer of Kolpinsky District of St. Petersburg Sergey Krokhin had been previously convicted for committing similar offenses--swindling and murder of six socially unprotected citizens--and was sentenced to life imprisonment. His accomplices received varying imprisonment sentences.

Video of investigative activities