Maidan trial: Experts tell how they find bullets from Berkut officers’ guns

At the court hearing in the case against five former officers of the Berkut special riot police force, accused of killing people during Maidan protests, the ballistics experts explained why the examinations of bullets had shown different results.

As UNIAN news agency correspondent reports, the ballistics experts from two scientific and expert institutions, who had carried out the examination of the bullets within the framework of pre-trial investigation of the case, were questioned during the court hearing.

The experts explained why no match between the bullets and the weapons, which had been assigned to the Berkut special force, had been found as a result of the examination of the bullets held in January 2015, whereas the examination carried out in December of the same year had showed such a match.

The experts told that the first examination was carried out by comparing the photos of bullets after their control shooting in 2012 with the bullets, seized at the scene. Since the Automatic Identification System works in 2D format, it compares only flat images, without taking into account the texture of the material under study. Therefore, the experts decided, having appealed to the investigating authorities, to carry out another probe and to examine the bullets manually, in the classical way by studying the bullets under the microscope.

It was this technique which, according to experts, is more perfect, found the match between the weapons and the bullets.

June 21, the prosecutors in the case of former Berkut officers made public the expert examination results, according to which, two out of twelve identified machine guns which belonged to former Berkut officers Oleksandr Zinchenko and Pavlo Abroskin and were used to kill three Euromaidan activists and wound two activists on February 20, 2014.

In 2014, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine submitted to court the criminal proceedings against former Berkut officers Oleksandr Zinchenko and Pavlo Abroskin, suspected of killing 39 Maidan activists on February 20, 2014.