Andriy Mukha, the lawyer representing victims of a fatal attack on Roma residents in Vilshany (Kharkiv oblast) has been attacked in his office by men who he says, were led by a local prosecutor. A criminal investigation has been launched, and although there were no witnesses to the actual attack, the assailants were not masked and there appears to be CCTV video footage.
Vadim Matyushenko, head of the ‘Romen’ civic organization which Mukha works for, says that he was called shortly after the attackers left, and found Mukha’s face swollen from the beating. Mukha told him that Ilhar Hasanov, an employee of the Derhachi Prosecutor’s Office and four other men burst into his office in the afternoon of 24 May and began beating and kicking him around the head and chest. They told him to stop representing the Roma victims of the events in Vilshany on May 16, 2017 and threatened to kill him if he didn’t obey them. According to Matyushenko, they also demanded “that he forget about the fact that Derhachi District prosecutor Volodymyr Lisotsky allowed the culprit (the man believed to have fired the fatal shot) Oleksiy Lytvynov out of the Derhachi police station after his arrest on May 16, 2017 and gave him the chance to destroy vital evidence (by washing and changing his clothes). “
