KYIV, Mar.12 – A Kyiv district court ordered the release from custody of radical rightwing UNA-UNSO Party leader Andry Shkil after finding no grounds for charging him with organizing mass unrest during Friday’s anti-presidential protest, the Inter TV channel’s Podrobnosti program reported on Sunday.
Several hundred protesters clashed with police in downtown Kyiv on Friday during a protest action against President Leonid Kuchma.
The fighting marked the first time since the mass protests began in mid-December that violence erupted between police and demonstrators, although earlier in March city authorities destroyed a symbolic anti-Kuchma tent camp on Kyiv’s main Khreshchatyk street.
Protest organizers said that authorities provoked the violence in order to give grounds for quashing the protest movement by force in future and to reject dialogue with the opposition. But law-enforcement officials said that police acted appropriately on Friday in response to violent attacks by protesters.
Earlier, protest organizers had consistently emphasized the peaceful nature of the demonstrations, which have demanded that Kuchma resign for alleged high-level corruption and involvement in the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze.
