In Donetsk region, police discovered new burials of civilians and military killed by occupiers
Investigators and forensics continue to work on the search and identification of those killed as a result of Russian war crimes. Local residents, military personnel and special search teams help in this. Since the beginning of the de-occupation, 385 bodies have been discovered in the region.
After the liberation of the Liman and Svyatogorsk communities in the autumn of last year, the police were added to the tasks of the police the establishment of places of spontaneous burial and exhumation of the bodies of people who died during the occupation and hostilities.
For half a year now, police have been finding new graves and unidentified corpses in the de-occupied territories. Law enforcement officers inspect the places of shelling, interview local residents, search for relatives of the dead, establish witnesses, and reconstruct the course of events. The objective of the investigators is to establish the identity and fate of each person killed.
Investigative and forensic laboratories are involved in the exhumation, and in cases of possible mining - explosives. Information about the death of a person is entered into the Unified Register of Pretrial Investigations, after which the cause of her death is established in a forensic medical institution. To identify the body, DNA samples are taken and comparative examinations are carried out with possible relatives.
In the village of Bogorodichne, almost completely destroyed by Russian troops, two elderly women and a man were exhumed. Civilians were buried in one of the courtyards.
The bodies of three more civilian men were exhumed in the Estuary.
In addition to civilians, military bodies are also being sought. So, after the de-occupation of the Estuary, a mass grave with the dead soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was found in the city cemetery - painstaking work began to identify each of them.
In total, Donetsk police officers found 385 bodies in the de-occupied territories, 309 of them civilians. Among the victims of Russian aggression - 174 men, 117 women, 6 children, the gender of another 12 people has not been established.
Work is underway to identify the dead. As of today, 282 people have been identified.
National Police of Ukraine
