The security guards who were shot dead in the Karavan shopping mall in Kyiv were unlicensed, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry has reported.

"One can hardly consider them security guards, as it was not even a private security firm. These are hypermarket officials who signed their post profiles in the staff department, and, in accordance with their post profiles, served as managers or security guard trainers," the ministry's spokesperson, Volodymyr Polischuk, said at a press conference in Kyiv on Tuesday.

He also said that they had no special licenses for security activity.