Amnesty International has found Witnesses to the Murder of a Prisoner
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There are at least five witnesses to the murder of a captured Donetsk airport defender, Igor Branovitskiy, by a militant leader known as “Motorola.”
This was stated on the air at Hromadke TV by a member of the Amnesty International monitoring group, Krasimir Yankov.
“Donetsk airport is blown up. There is already nothing to protect and the cyborgs who stayed there are giving up. Some of them have been taken prisoner. Among these people was Igor Branovitskiy. There is a video of the exact moment when his group was taken prisoner. Within a few minutes, he is seen beaten with blood on his face. The next moment, he is already dead. He was brought to some kind of shooting range where there were 12 people. They began to beat him in order to find out who was a machine gunner. During the battle for the airport, many of the separatists were killed by machine gun fire. As we were told later by the people who were there, there wasn’t one particular machine gunner. Everyone was shooting from using what was available. But, Branovitskiy stepped forward. It seems to us that he wanted to protect the others. He was beaten to the point that he was lying in a pool of blood. Then, Motorola came and asked who called an ambulance. We think that one of the separatists did. They pointed to Branovitskiy. Motorola said that he would now “help” him and shot him twice in the head. There are at least five witnesses to this,” said Yankov.
As Yankov stated, the causes and circumstances of the murder of three other prisoners, Oleksander Berdes, Vasil Demchuk, and Pavel Platsinskiy, are not entirely clear.
“Berdes, Demchuk and Platsinskiy were found in forested area in the Proletarskiy district of Donetsk. It is approximately 88 kilometers from the village Lohvynove, where they were captured. This means that they were deliberately brought there. The context of the events on February 9th also must be taken into account. It was the beginning of an offensive against Debaltseve. Separatists took Lohvynove and a pocket was formed, it was a hot moment of the battle. It seems very strange that, at that time, they were being transported to Donetsk, but not brought there. We think that if they were to be brought there, they would be brought as prisoners to be held at the SBU building in Donetsk or elsewhere. If they had already been dead, they would have been taken to the morgue. But, they were found in the forested area under a thin layer of soil. This appears very strange to us,” he said.
As previously reported, it is known that eight Ukrainian POWs were murdered by separatists. Meanwhile, Motorola declares that he personally killed fifteen.
Earlier, human rights organizations condemned the shelling of a trolley bus which killed civilians, as well as the so-called “parade of prisoners of war,” which took place on January 22nd in Donetsk.
