A Canadian man who raped and murdered four indigenous women, dismembered their bodies and disposed of them in garbage cans was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday.

Jeremy Skibicki, 37, was found guilty of first-degree murder in Winnipeg, Manitoba, last month after the defence failed to prove that his ability to commit the crimes was impaired by mental illness.

Judge Glenn Joyal accused Skibicki of “inhumanity and barbarism” in his written ruling and sentenced him to four concurrent life sentences – without the possibility of parole for the next 25 years. The case is seen by many as a symbol of the plight of indigenous women in a country where they face disproportionate violence.

In court on Wednesday, he added, according to local media, that the verdict “regrettably does not adequately reflect the seriousness of these crimes and your moral culpability.”

According to his trial, between March and May 2022, Skibicki targeted Indigenous women he met in homeless shelters.

He would take them to his apartment to sexually abuse them before strangling them or drowning them in his bathtub and then performing further sexual acts on their bodies.

The remains of his victims, Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, are believed to have ended up in a landfill north of the city, which is currently being searched, while the partial remains of another victim, Rebecca Contois, were found in a garbage can in Winnipeg and at another landfill.

The body of a fourth, unidentified woman in her twenties, whom Skibicki confessed to killing along with the others, is still missing. Local indigenous leaders named her Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, which means “buffalo woman.”

According to local media, Harris’ daughter Elle said it was “horrifying” to hear how her mother was killed during the trial.

“Mr. Skibicki’s heinous crimes have left deep scars on First Nations communities,” Grand Chief Cathy Merrick of the Assembly of Chiefs of Manitoba was quoted as saying in court.

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About one-fifth of all women killed in gender-related homicides in the country are indigenous women – even though they make up only five percent of the female population.

In 2019, a national commission even went so far as to describe the thousands of murders and disappearances of First Nations women over the years as “genocide.”

In his ruling in July, Judge Joyal said the case was “symbolic of much of the tragedies underlying the grim reality of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.”