Ukraine's Security Service announced on Feb. 6 that it has found fragments of 23 guns reportedly used to shoot protesters during one of the bloodiest days of the EuroMaidan Revolution on Feb. 20, 2014. At least 49 activists were killed in Kyiv that day.
Hryhoriy Ostafiychuk, an SBU representative, said on Feb. 6 that they have identified fragments of 12 weapons. The firearms examination started after the SBU recovered a cache of arms in Holosiivsky district in Kyiv on Aug. 12. The SBU said those fragments of weapons belonged to one of Kyiv’s Berkut riot police units.
After the EuroMaidan Revolution, at least 24 firearms disappeared from the Berkut unit, including 7.62mm Kalashnikov rifles, a Dragunov sniper rifle and three shotguns.
The weapons were damaged as their ID numbers were filed off, Ostafiychuk said.
Ukraine’s Security Service announced on Feb. 6 that it has found some fragments of 23 guns reportedly used to shoot protesters on Feb. 20, 2014.
Ostafiychuk didn’t confirm, however, whether those weapons were used directly against the protesters on Feb. 20, 2014. “More examination will be needed,” he said.
All the findings were passed to the Prosecutor General’s Office for further investigation.
Serhiy Horbatyuk, who heads the Special Investigations Department at the Prosecutor General’s Office said that the discovered weapons were the ones they were looking. The Prosecutor General’s Office will complete the investigation and pass all findings to court.
Five members of the Berkut riot police – now disbanded – were arrested on suspicion of mass murder during the anti-government protests in Kyiv between Feb. 18 and Feb. 20. Two of the cases have been passed to court, Horbatyuk said, adding that the found firearm fragments belonged to some of the detained Berkut police officers.
At least 20 members are on the SBU’s wanted list. According to prosecutors, some of them might be in Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea.
Earlier, Horbatyuk admitted that the Prosecutor General’s Office still did not put anyone in jail for persecution of the EuroMaidan protesters that resulted in at least 104 civilian casualties.
Two years after Yanukovych fled Ukraine, little has been done to bring the perpetrators of violence to justice. Over the course of 2015, a number of international organizations, including Amnesty International together with the Council of Europe’s International Advisory Group and the United Nation’s Commission on Human Rights, criticized Ukraine’s lack of progress on the killings and violence during the 94 days of the revolution.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected].
