UKRAINE: BODIES EXHUMED FROM MASS GRAVE IN LIBERATED LYMAN (VIDEO)

Wed 12 October 2022:

Several bodies wrapped in black plastic were pulled from a mass grave Tuesday in Ukraine’s devastated city of Lyman, part of an arduous effort to piece together evidence of what happened during more than four months of Russian occupation.

Ten body bags lay beside a roughly 30-meter trench from which authorities said 32 bodies had been exhumed so far, In the city of Lyman, Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.

According to Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the Donetsk region’s military administration, in Lyman, the bodies were Ukrainian soldiers who had been buried together in a mass grave.

Another 22 civilians have been exhumed from individual graves at the burial site, located on the edge of a cemetery in a forested area on the outskirts of Lyman. The burial site was the second found in Lyman so far, further exhumations are planned,

Lyman was liberated by Ukrainian forces at the end of September as part of a rapid Ukrainian counteroffensive which recaptured swaths of the Donetsk, Kharkiv and Kherson regions from Russian control.

Forensic investigators on Tuesday lifted a black plastic bag from the trench and unzipped it to reveal a decomposed body in a bloody uniform of the Ukrainian armed forces. The remains were briefly inspected by investigators, then placed in another body bag and set among several others beside the trench.

Children were discovered among the dead, according to authorities, and the majority of victims appeared to have died as a result of the heavy shelling that had besieged the city for months.

They were cautious in describing whether any of the bodies exhumed Tuesday showed signs of torture or execution, emphasizing that the investigation was still in its early stages.

Other towns liberated from Russian occupation in Ukraine, such as Bucha northwest of Kyiv and Izium in the Kharkiv region, are now the sites of war crimes investigations.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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