You're reading: Yanukovych calling for personnel reshuffles in connection with incident in Vradiivka

 Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych demands law enforcement agencies get rid of unworthy people in connection with the events in Vradiivka (Mykolaiv region).

"I demand that the law enforcement agencies should make major staff changes in connection with the [rape] case in Mykolaiv region," he said, speaking at the ceremony of taking oath by judges in Kyiv on Thursday.

 The president has stressed that to prevent the recurrence of such incidents in the future, it is necessary that the police should deal with all crimes, which still have unresolved question or omissions left.

“A tough decision should be taken at a meeting of law enforcement agencies, most importantly the Interior Ministry, the Security Service and the Prosecutor’s Office to cleanse [these agencies] from the unworthy people, and to ensure a rapid response to the complaints of citizens,” he added.

As reported, on June 26, three men pulled a 29-year-old woman into a car in the village of Vradiivka, took her to the forest near the village of Syrove, where they beat her up and raped her. The victim was hospitalized with open fractures of the skull, cut wounds to the head and face, multiple bruises and hematomas. She has had two surgeries, and her condition is regarded as serious.

The rape victim told the investigator that she was beaten and raped by two police officers – Lt. Dmytro Polischuk and Lt. Yevhen Dryzhak. A local taxi driver, Mykhailo Rabinenko, participated in the beating.

Polischuk and Rabinenko were detained on June 30. Dryzhaka, according to law enforcers, has an alibi – he supposedly was on duty at the police department at the time of the crime.

The fact that the second policeman was at large triggered protests by local residents who demanded his immediate arrest. On July 1, they were storming the district police department demanding the police officers involved be prosecuted.

On July 2, Dryzhak was detained. On July 3, the court ruled to place him under two-month arrest as a pre-trial restriction measure.

The press service of the district prosecutor’s office said that four premeditated murders were committed in Vradiivka district in 2011-2013, three of them in 2011 and one in 2012. Among them is an unsolved murder of a 15-year-old girl.

Locals say that this case is not the first unresolved crime in the district. Crimes were concealed or not investigated properly in the past. The local police did not investigate them objectively, and beat out the testimony of random people to improve the crime detection rate.