Police arrest mass murder suspect (05/12/96)

Police arrest mass murder suspect

KYIV - A murder spree that resulted in the deaths of at least 42 victims was brought to an apparent end on April 14 with the arrest of 37-year-old Anatoliy Onupriyenko in Yavoriv, a town in western Ukraine. A report in the April 20 Los Angeles Times and numerous accounts by Ukrainian media indicated that Interior Ministry officials felt they had got their man.

The Times article quoted Deputy Interior Minister Leonid Borodych as saying that police attempts to identify and corner the killer were complicated by the wide geographical spread of the killings.

The first slaying took place in December 1995 in the western village of Bratkovychi, when the perpetrator shotgunned an entire family, including two children. Over the following months, the killer struck in eight different locations, ranging from Yavoriv in Lviv Oblast to the city of Enerhodar, near the eastern city of Zaporizhzhia.

Bratkovychi was hit twice, which shocked local residents and turned the village into an armed camp, with hundreds of national guardsmen, Interior Ministry troops and special forces units patrolling the area after the second gruesome attack, in which seven persons were shot and their home set afire.

Only after the March 22 killings of a family of four some 30 miles from Bratkovychi, did investigators detect a pattern, which hinted that the killer was riding Ukraine's railways to the sites of his attacks, said the Los Angeles Times report.

After his arrest, Mr. Onupriyenko, a former forestry student, confessed to the murder since 1989 of over 50 people, which may put him ahead of Andrei Chikatilo, the infamous "Rostov Ripper" who claimed a similar number of victims in southern Russia over 17 years.

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