Many officials named in criminal cases over Maidan dispersal – prosecutor general
The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine has reported that a significant number of officials are suspects in criminal cases opened as part of the investigation into the February events on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, when over a hundred protesters and several security officers were killed.
"We're doing our best for this crime to be solved objectively. The involvement of the murderers, the direct executors, is clear for us today. We also determined the involvement of the organizers: these are police chiefs and heads of the Interior Ministry of Ukraine. They also have been put on the wanted list and their clients have been established: Viktor Yanukovych and the then Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine [Andriy Kliuyev], as well as employees of the Cabinet of Ministers, who took decisions contradicting current law," Prosecutor General of Ukraine Vitaliy Yarema in Kyiv on Wednesday.
"Many officials are targeted in the investigation," Yarema added.
As for Berkut riot police officers guilty of shooting activists on Independence Square in February 2014, Yarema said that the materials against them will be submitted to the court in August.
"There are several points to this case: the dispersal of the Maidan, the deaths of five people in Mariyinsky Park on February 18, and the murder of journalist Viacheslav Veremiy. But the main incident is the mass shootings of people on Instytutska Street," the PGO press service quotes Yarema as saying.
The prosecutor general said that a huge number of special task force officers were involved in shooting people.
"At least 21 persons participated in the shooting of Maidan activists, three of them have already been identified, they have already been informed they are suspects," he said.
However, Yarema said that investigators have encountered certain problems in the course of the inquiry because all of the executors of the crime wore masks during the tragic events.
Yarema also said that nothing was known so far about the whereabouts of the weapons used during the shootings.
