Deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine and chief military prosecutor Anatoliy Matios has said citing preliminary information that Yuriy Hrabovsky, a lawyer for Russian military serviceman Alexander Alexandrov, was killed with the use of firearms.

"I can say tentatively that lawyer Hrabovsky was shot with firearms," Matios said at a briefing in Kyiv on Friday.

Matios said that the evidence of the murder was destroyed at the crime scene: the clothes, which the two killers wore, and the cash, which was paid for the crime.

In his words, they tried to create an illusion of Hrabovsky's departure from Ukraine allegedly to Egypt. There were reports that the lawyer cannot return to Ukraine due to harassment and threats, which according to the chief military prosecutor, was not true.

Matios said that investigators were checking which psychotropic substances were used on Hrabovsky to bring him from Odesa to Kyiv, and then to deliver him to the area of Zhashkiv, Cherkasy region, where he was killed.

In addition, the prosecutor said that the captors used a special bracelet which was attached to Hrabovsky's leg. According to the detainees, the lawyer was told that this was the bracelet full of explosives, which could be activated at any attempt on his part to report his abduction.

The chief military prosecutor also thanked Head of the Security Service of Ukraine Vasyl Hrytsak for providing the best experts for this operation – the three men who, according to Matios, earlier caught former head of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry's external surveillance department Oleksiy Pukach, who was convicted for the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze in 2000.