You're reading: Activist Lutsenko alive, describes kidnapping; other activist found dead (UPDATED)

Yuriy Verbytsky, a Euromaidan protester abducted along with activist Ihor Lutsenko, has been found dead in Boryspil, a suburb of Kyiv, reports Radio Svoboda, citing family members who said they had identified his body in the Boryspil morgue.

Verbytsky was kidnapped along with activist Lutsenko on Jan. 21. Lutsenko’s girlfriend Maria Lebedeva, who sounded the public alarm about his abduction via Facebook.

Lutsenko late on Jan. 21 wrote on his Facebook page that he had been freed by his captors and recounted how he thought he was going to be killed after 10 men kidnapped and terrorized him and Verbytsky. He thought he was going to say “goodbye to life” a “minimum of three times in the last 24 hours.”

“I got out from the forest, where my kidnappers
brought and left me, I’m in a good mood, without mobile phone and in average
condition,” Lutsenko wrote about his condition.

The activist said that 10 men abducted him and Verbytsky. They were kidnapped in Oleksandrivska Hospital
in Kyiv, where Verbytsky was seeking treatment for an eye injury suffered in a
clash with police.

 “About
10 of them came in and dragged us into a bus in front of the eyes of a woman
doctor.”

Their abductors drove them through the forest
and put them into two separate cells in a building that looked like an
abandoned garage and left for about 10 hours.

Lutsenko didn’t give the details about either
his abductors or their talks saying only:

“I noticed they were not just the hired people,
they are truly ideological en masse,” Lutsenko wrote. “Though the talks were
not easy, I think that many (of them) understood something about Maidan and
about my personal point.”  

After the talks, the kidnappers took the
activist to the forest, forced stand on his knees with a package on his head
put against a pine tree and demanded to pray, which made him think they were
planning to kill him. “When I was saying prayer my companions disappeared. I
even didn’t hear when it happened,” he wrote.

So Lutsenko walked through the forest, “almost
fainting” sometimes. He didn’t write about the happened to Verbytsky.

Lutsenko was treated in Borys clinic in
Kyiv.

See story: Two EuroMaidan activists missing; foul play suspected

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]