A series of forensic expert studies has shown that a bullet extracted from the body of Oleksandr Muzychko, a leader of the Ukrainian nationalistic organization Right Sector, who died from a gunshot wound when security forces attempted to detain him at the end of March, and a bullet that wounded a police officer during the operation had been fired from a Makarov pistol belonging to Muzychko himself, Ukrainian Deputy Prosecutor General Oleksiy Bahanets said.
Speaking at a meeting of the Verkhovna Rada’s ad hoc investigative commission probing Muzychko’s death on Tuesday, Bahanets said the Prosecutor General’s Office was pursuing two possible theories of the activist’s death, i.e. that he was killed by members of the Sokil task force through exceeding reasonable measures necessary to detain him and that he killed himself by accidentally pulling the trigger of his pistol “in the process of struggle with police officials.”
Over 27 forensic medical and criminological studies have been ordered, and conclusions on some of them have already been made,” he said.
“These are not all expert conclusions, but here is what the investigator has in hand now. The bullet collected from under Muzychko’s corpse during the examination of the scene, the bullet retrieved during his autopsy, and the bullet extracted from the arm of a wounded police official had been fired from the same Makarov pistol seized from Muzychko,” Bahanets said.
Twenty-one witnesses, including the leaders and some members of the Sokil task force, and also the men who were involved in detaining Muzychko have been questioned as part of the investigation, he said.
