Police have charged nine men, including a former policeman, with killing 17 truck drivers in the last year as part of an organized gang operation, a police official said Monday.


Nikolai Vakhrameyev, the officer investigating the killings, said in a telephone interview that police had also charged the members of the gang with armed robbery following a two-month investigation. If convicted, the men could get sentences ranging from three years to the death penalty.


"The gang was headed by Vladimir Belousov, 35, who was previously a truck driver himself," Vakhrameyev said. "There was also a former traffic police officer in the gang."


He said the suspects had "confessed to 17 killings," but he suspects they committed more."


The gangsters sold at least 10 stolen trucks for 9 million rubles (about $4,500) each to a man in Armavir in southern Russia, who also had been detained by police, Vakhrameyev said. He declined to identify the buyer.


"This man, in his turn, sold each truck for 19 million rubles to farmers," he said.


Vakhrameyev said the gang had operated in the Moscow and the Vladimir regions and had been planning to commit two more killings in the near future. Police have confiscated from the criminals five Makarov pistols, which are used by police and military officers, and 176 other firearms, he said.


He said most of the killings had been committed not far from the Moscow Ring Road in places where truck drivers liked to make rest stops.


The gangsters would meet the drivers at such a stop and offer good money to do a job, the police officers said.


"Belousov, a former truck driver, knew very well how to do it and, therefore, his proposal sounded very reliable," Vakhrameyev said. "He usually asked them to transport timber from what he said was a nearby sawmill."


If a truck driver agreed to carry out the job, the men accompanied him to a nearby forest where they shot him and often burned the body, Vakhrameyev said.


Vakhrameyev said truck drivers from Western Europe had not been victimized because police were more likely to be suspicious if they saw a foreign truck pulled off the road.


Gennady Melnik, a spokesman for the Moscow region police, said that although police did not have special statistics of the attacks against truck drivers the number of such incidents had increased by several times over last year.