The Irkutsk Regional Court sentenced Alexey Torop, a resident of the village of Balagansk and a former local investigator, to 22 years in a maximum security colony, according to the website of the regional department of the Investigative Committee.
Torop was found guilty of 30 counts of receiving sexual services from minors (Article 240.1 of the Criminal Code), two rapes (Article 131 of the Criminal Code) and murder by a group of persons committed by prior conspiracy and involving rape (clauses “g” and “j” of Part 2 of Article 105 of the Criminal Code).
Initially, Torop was charged with nine counts of rape, the press service of the Irkutsk Regional Court said in a statement. A jury returned a guilty verdict against him.
The court found that in 2007, Torop raped and strangled a 15-year-old girl who was planning to go to a disco with her friend in the evening. The whole village was looking for her — on March 19, a day after the murder, her body was found in the garden of a private house on Koltsevaya Street, former district police officer Alexander Prokopyev told RIA Novosti.
Torop himself began to investigate the murder case — he was the only investigator of the prosecutor's office in Balagansk. “There was a witness who saw Irina get into investigator Torop’s car the night before. There was another person in the cabin,” Prokopyev said later.
First, a 25-year-old local resident was sent to the pre-trial detention center, who in 2006 was released from a colony, where he was serving a sentence for murder and rape committed as a teenager. After this, Torop had to recuse himself, since the suspect was his relative. The case was transferred to another investigator.
Torop himself soon retired, and in 2009 received the status of lawyer of the Balagansky branch of the Irkutsk Regional Collegium. The ex-investigator and his accomplice, taxi driver Evgeniy Lats, were detained only in 2020, when a secret witness testified against them.
“During the investigation, it was possible to collect evidence of the defendant’s involvement in a number of crimes of a sexual nature that were committed by him in the territory of the village of Balagansk in 2007 and in the period from 2018 to 2020,” the Investigative Committee said in a statement .
The court sentenced Latsa to ten years in a maximum security colony. The court clarified that the first hearing in the case took place on October 27, the process was held behind closed doors. The defendants themselves asked for a trial by jury. According to Kommersant's source, Torop did not admit guilt.