MOSCOW, January 14. /TASS/. Former policeman Mikhail Popkov was sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison after he was found guilty of murdering 22 women in Russia’s south-eastern Siberia in late 1990s, Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the Russian Investigative Committee, said Wednesday.

Investigators established that Popkov, born 1964, went on a killing spree between 1994 and 2000, murdering women in the Angarsk and Irkutsk regions.

According to the investigation data, women kept disappearing in the evenings and nights from public places in the city of Angarsk in 1994-2000. Mutilated bodies of the disappeared women were later discovered on the territories of the south-eastern districts of Siberia's Irkutsk Region.

In June of 2012, a series of DNA tests revealed that local resident Mikhail Popkov, a former Angarsk policeman, had been involved in the crimes and was arrested. Offical charges against him were pressed in May of 2014.

Popkov initially confessed to three murder accounts, but the further investigation proved that the suspected serial killer was behind 22 murders and two attempted murders.