Listing of notorious serial killer among notable alumni angers university
A university in Russia was outraged to discover Andrei Chikatilo, the country’s most notorious serial killer, listed among its notable alumni in Google search results. It has complained to Google, demanding removal of the data.
The century-old university was shocked to discover that if you Google “Rostov State University” (former name of SFedU) or “notable alumni of Rostov State University” in Russian, Chikatilo’s name appears. The Russian Jack the Ripper did study in absentia at its philology faculty in the late 1960s, but the university doesn’t want its name to be associated with him. “We wrote to Google employees that Chikatilo was a dangerous criminal and a serial killer, and he is not, as they say, our notable alumnus,” said a representative from Southern Federal University (SFedU) in Rostov.
“A complaint about the content in Google has been sent [to the company],” they told Russian TASS agency.
As of Saturday afternoon, the tech giant hasn’t deleted the name of Russia’s most prolific murderer, also known as the Butcher of Rostov or the Rostov Ripper, from the university’s notable alumni list. His name pops up alongside Nobel Literature Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, founding father of information technology in the Soviet Union Viktor Glushkov, as well as Russian model and TV personality Victoria Lopyreva.
The university says it can’t figure out what informed Google’s choice of names and why it decided to put Chikatilo’s name on the list. “If you look closely at the list, you can see that the names of many really talented alumni are absent,” it added.
Chikatilo killed at least 52 predominantly pre-teen boys and post-pubescent girls between 1978 and 1990, when he was eventually arrested. He was sentenced to death for these murders and was executed in 1994. For years, police had been locked in a cat-and-mouse chase with the murderer as the bodies of gruesomely mutilated victims piled up.
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