About a week after the Russian occupiers left the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, dozens of bodies with traces of torture have now been found, according to Ukrainian sources. In addition, numerous interrogation rooms have been found where, according to the Kiev government, brutal interrogations have taken place.
Interior Minister Denis Monastyrskyj stressed on Ukrainian television that the investigations are just beginning. The bodies of 63 people are now due for autopsy. With numerous buildings apparently still being mined, Western journalists have not yet been able to visit many alleged torture chambers.
In Kherson, law enforcement officers discovered 436 cases of war crimes committed during the Russian occupation. Eleven places of detention were found, including four where torture had taken place. “Detectives are investigating and recording every case of torture. The bodies of the dead are also exhumed,” said Monastyrskyj. Ukraine’s Internal Intelligence Service posted photos of one of these detention centers on its Twitter page (see below).
“Electric shocks, beatings and lack of oxygen”
A representative of Kherson’s prosecutor’s office told the New York Times that testimony had been gathered about 800 arrests by Russian troops in the region. The most common forms of ill-treatment were electric shocks, beatings with plastic or rubber batons, and cutting off the breathing tube of a gas mask that was pulled over the prisoners’ heads. In the summer, people fleeing Kherson reported torture and illegal arrests during interrogation by the human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW). “They turned the territories they occupied into an abyss of fear and wild anarchy,” HRW representative Julia Gorbunova said at the time.
Ukraine and international investigators accuse Russia of war crimes in occupied territories. Russia denies that its troops have attacked civilians and committed atrocities. Mass graves were found in other areas previously occupied by Russian forces, including some with the bodies of civilians showing signs of torture.
Source: Krone
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