At least 24 civilians, including a pregnant woman and 13 children, were found dead by bullets in their cars in northeastern Ukraine, near Kupyansk, announced the governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleg Sinegubov, clarifying that the count is temporary.
“The Russian occupiers attacked civilians trying to escape the bombings. They fired at close range“, he said.
Police and experts are at the scene and an investigation is underway, Oleg Sinegubov added.
The local prosecutor’s office announced that seven cars containing civilians were found at the scene.
“Two cars were completely burnt. In them were children with their parents: they were burned alive“, the announcement of the prosecutor’s office states.
The representative of the Kharkiv district prosecutor’s office Dmytro Subenko said in a television interview that the site of the massacre is in a gray zone of the forehead, which complicates the investigation.
“The Ukrainian army’s control over the zone is not permanent. At one point it’s under our control and then it’s under Russian control and we can’t do all the research».
According to the head of Ukraine’s security service Vassily Maliuk, “the Russians are defeated on the battlefield and in their desperation they react by killing civilians”.
“But they will not escape punishment. We will find them all and they will be held accountable for the atrocities committed.”.
On Friday (30/09) an AFP team saw at least 11 bodies of civilians, who had been killed in their cars, on a road that had been abandoned by the Russians during their retreat from the area last week.
The convoy of cars seen by the AFP team was on a road leading out of the village of Kirillifka, 70km east of Kharkiv.
At the scene, the bodies were still there, inside the vehicles or next to the cars. A minibus was completely burnt. Four bodies, one of which was a child, were found in the seats of the burning car.
The site is in an area that has recently seen clashes between Russians and Ukrainians, as Ukrainian forces launched a wide-ranging counterattack, forcing Russian forces to retreat eastward.
A spokesman for the separatists accused Ukrainian forces from Moscow on Thursday of “shooting at a phalanx of civilian vehicles in the Kharkiv region, killing 30,” without elaborating.
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