Convicted Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton died on Friday aged 74 after he was assaulted by another inmate in a maximum-security prison earlier this month, prison authorities said.

One of Canada’s most infamous mass murderers, Pickton was convicted in 2007 of killing drug addicts and prostitutes and butchering their remains at his pig farm in the Pacific province of British Columbia.

He was convicted of killing six women whose partial remains were found on his ramshackle property near Vancouver. Government prosecutors dropped charges for an additional 20 murders after he was sentenced to life in prison.

Canada’s correctional service said Pickton had died after being assaulted on May 19 in the Quebec prison where he had been serving his sentence. Following the assault, he was transported to hospital to receive treatment.

“We are mindful that this offender’s case has had a devastating impact on communities in British Columbia and across the country,” the service said in a statement.

The victims were among more than 60 women who disappeared from Vancouver’s poor, drug-infested Downtown Eastside neighborhood over more than a decade until Pickton’s arrest in early 2002.

The remains or DNA of 33 women, many of whom were Indigenous, were found on Pickton’s pig farm in Port Coquitlam, about 25 kilometers east of downtown Vancouver.

In 2016, a book reportedly written by Pickton was pulled from Amazon within hours of it appearing for sale. In the book, the serial killer said he was innocent and had been framed by police, the Vancouver Sun reported at the time.

The publisher requested its removal from Amazon and apologized to victims’ families.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Kigali, Rwanda:

A man has been arrested in Rwanda after the discovery of more than 10 bodies buried in a hole in the kitchen of his home in the capital Kigali, police and media reports said Wednesday. Police said the 34-year-old suspected serial killer had lured his victims from bars to his rented home in a Kigali suburb.

Local media said more than 10 bodies had been found, and a source in the Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) told AFP on condition of anonymity that the number of victims so far was 14.

RIB spokesman Thierry Murangira declined to confirm a figure, telling AFP that “the final number will be determined by forensic investigations”.

The suspect had initially been arrested in July on suspicion of robbery and rape among other offences but was granted bail due to a lack of evidence, he said, quoted by local media.

Investigations continued however and he was rearrested on Tuesday and his home searched, leading to the discovery of the bodies dumped in a pit he had dug in his kitchen.

“The suspect confessed that he learned to kill from watching famous serial killers. He dissolved some of his victims in acid,” the RIB source said.

“He would study his victims before stalking them and usually went for those that are most likely not to have close family or friends to look out for them.”

Murangira said the suspect had confessed during interrogation to the killings and that preliminary investigations had found the victims were both male and female.

“He operated by luring his victims, mostly prostitutes, to his home where he would rob them of their phones and belongings and then strangled them to death and buried them in a hole dug in the kitchen of his rented house,” he added.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)