News

The evidence gathered by the Saint Petersburg Investigations Directorate of the Investigative Committee of Russia has been found by the court to be sufficient to sentence Sergey Krokhin. He has been found guilty of committing offenses under Parts 3, 5 and Paragraphs A, G, H of Part 2 of Article 105; Paragraphs G, J of Part 2 of Article 105; Part 4 of Article 159; Part 1 of Article 30 and Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of Russia (organization of and mediation in murder; murder; swindling; attempted swindling).

The investigation and the court 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; he had enrolled Zabar Zubov, Gennady Ageyev, Victoria Godovikova, Valentina Torochkova, and Viktor Zorin in the group.

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. Ageyev, 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.

From August 2010 to March 2015, the accomplices had committed four murders and two episodes of swindling.

The court has sentenced Krokhin who signed a pre-trial immunity agreement to 12.5 years of imprisonment. Together with his previous sentence, Krokhin has been sentenced to life imprisonment and serving his sentence in a special regime correctional colony.

The criminal case into Zorin, Zubov, Ageyev, Godovikova, and Torochkova is being considered in the court.