- ZHYTOMYR, Ukraine -- The door to the cramped and dingy prison sitting
room opened and three armed guards in fur hats tramped in. They paused
for a moment and looked toward the still open door.
-
- "Onoprienko!'' one called out. "Come
in.''
-
- There was a shuffling noise in the hallway
before a slight, balding man in a grey duffel-coat, blue polyester tracksuit
bottoms and battered tennis shoes sauntered in, his hands manacled behind
his back.
-
- Anatoly Onoprienko, the self-confessed
murderer of 52 people across Ukraine, hesitated.
-
- "You'll sit there and they will
sit here. You understand?'' the guard said, gesturing toward opposite sides
of a narrow desk set in front of a blank white wall.
-
- Onoprienko, whose pale, chiseled features
have become the most loathed in Ukraine, nodded briefly and eased himself
into the chair, his eyes on the desk and his arms hanging behind him.
-
- The sandy-haired Onoprienko has confessed
to the 52 murders - most of them in the space of three months in early
1996 - in one of the world's most bloody serial killing sprees. His trial
started Monday in this west Ukrainian town.
-
- Another man, Sergei Rogozin, is also
on trial with Onoprienko, accused of being an accomplice in a handful of
the murders.
-
- Whole families and couples, old people
and children, were shot with a sawed-off rifle and their homes set ablaze.
-
- "I have never regretted anything
and I don't regret anything now,'' he told Reuters and a regional Ukrainian
newspaper in a bizarre and emotional hour-long interview late Tuesday in
which he said cosmic forces planned to destroy humanity and replace it
with "bio-robots.''
-
- With the guards sitting in a row on a
green couch just a foot away, Onoprienko looked his interviewers in the
eye and spoke in an intense, rapid voice, at times almost fierce, of his
early discovery of special telepathic powers.
-
- Claiming hypnotic powers and saying he
had information ''nobody, not even the president'' had access to, he said
he had received "permission'' to kill, but did not explain what drove
him to destroy his victims.
-
- "I love all people and I loved those
I killed. I looked those children I murdered in the eyes and knew that
it had to be done,'' he said.
-
- "For you it's 52 murders, but for
me that's the norm.''
-
- He said he would have been prepared to
kill his own son.
-
- A former forestry student, sailor and
soldier who says his mother died when he was four and his father and brother
gave him to an orphanage at seven, Onoprienko said at one point in the
investigation he had heard voices telling him to do the murders.
-
- Despite that, police said at the time
they considered him psychologically fit.
-
- Under Ukrainian law, a suspect deemed
insane cannot stand trial for murder and would instead be committed to
a mental institution. Onoprienko said several times during Tuesday's interview
that he had spent a spell in a "loony bin.''
-
- Public pressure for Onoprienko to be
handed the death sentence is intense in Ukraine, where the memory of the
horrific murders is still sharp and few support the moratorium on executions
set up after Ukraine joined the Council of Europe, a grouping of European
democracies.
-
- "He's an animal, not a human being,''
whispered Yekaterina, a 64-year-old woman, on the first day of his trial
in the chilly local court Monday. "They ought to hand him over to
the relatives of his victims and the witnesses so that they can tear him
apart.''
-
- Onoprienko seemed unfazed by the prison
regime and food.
-
- "I started preparing for prison
life a long time ago -- I fasted, did yoga,'' he said, adding all he wanted
now was death.
-
- "I am not afraid of death,'' he
said. "Death for me is nothing.''
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