Some 3,000 Ukrainians who are working in the medical sector in Libya have found themselves in the middle of the turmoil in Libya, the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in Ukraine reported on Tuesday.
The Ukrainian doctors are saying they are being made to work at gunpoint "for the good of the revolution," the paper has reported.
Mykhailo Firtel, a physician with the Bengazi central hospital N12, who came to Africa from Zhytomyr, said hundreds of wounded and killed people have been taken to the hospital over the past three days and the morgues are full.
Firtel said people in military uniform had told the doctors on Saturday that the city belongs to the opposition. "They said we would have no replacement due to the huge number of wounded people. They were sent to mobile medical points, which were organized in the city’s schools. We don’t know what is happening to our colleagues, they cannot be contacted. It is possible that they are working with bullets flying over their heads," he said.
Firtel said the gunmen were polite at first, but eventually warned the doctors that anyone who attempted to escape would be shot and killed. "We can no longer leave the territory of the hospital. There are security guards at the entrance. Some of our colleagues have wives and children. They have to sit in basements and wait for help," the doctor said.
Sources in Komsomolskaya Pravda in Ukraine said the journalists have managed to telephone the Ukrainian embassy when the Tuesday edition of the paper was already being printed.
"We are getting information on casualties among Ukrainians, but we cannot check it as communications are not working and there is no Internet connection. The situation is very tense. Our officials are not going outside: there is gunfire and explosions there. No one is guarding the embassy building so we are having to take all precautions. We can’t leave here either: there is no gasoline in the country, and the food situation is very difficult also," one of the diplomats told Komsomolskaya Pravda in Ukraine.
