Investigators notified only 47 people of being suspects in Maidan crimes

Investigators have managed to notify only 47 people of being suspects in crimes committed on Independence Square in Kyiv this winter, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office has reported.

"We have currently managed to really notify 47 persons of being suspects," Deputy Prosecutor General and Head of the Main Investigation Department Oleh Zalisko said at a briefing in Kyiv on Wednesday.

He said that the impossibility of bringing to justice the organizers of mass killings had seriously impeded the investigation. He said that former officials and law enforcement officers involved in these crimes had destroyed the evidence, in particular, documents on the removal of weapons, investigative cases, and information about the deployment of security forces.

"This significantly influenced the timing and completeness of a pre-trial investigation," Zalisko said.

He also said that 1,167 criminal proceedings were being investigated due to the events on the Maidan this winter and that 77 people had been notified of being suspects. Sixty-seven people were killed with firearms and 184 sustained gunshot wounds in the center of Kyiv in February 2014. Over 750 people sustained injuries not related to the use of firearms, Zalisko said.

Earlier, an advisor to the Ukrainian interior minister, Anton Heraschenko, said that Russia's policy interfered with bringing to justice a number of identified persons involved in murders on Euromaidan in Kyiv and other crimes, as a lot of suspects are hiding in Russia.

In his article for the Dzerkalo Tyzhnia (Weekly Mirror) newspaper Ukrainian Prosecutor General Vitaliy Yarema wrote that 74 peaceful citizens and 12 policemen had been killed in Kyiv downtown on February 18-20, 2014, while 180 citizens and over 180 law enforcers had suffered gunshot wounds.

Source: Interfax-Ukraine