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Donetsk president Zakharchecko dies in bombing attack
Zakharchecko heads an august list of victims, including top separatist military formation commanders who died violently, although not by Ukrainian fire. Fotos which emerged over the years showed Zakharchecko surrounded by a massive security detail, so it would have been hard to get to the guy via direct fire engagement.According to Russian blogger Andrei Chervonets, five others were killed in the attack including a child. [AlJazeera] A key separatist leader in eastern Ukraine has been killed in a blast at a coffee shop in Donetsk, according to rebels. The explosion on Friday fatally wounded Alexander Zakharchenko, head of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic, which has been pushing for independence since 2014 after Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula. Russia accused Ukraine of assassinating the 42-year-old, but Kiev said it had nothing to do with the explosion and blamed separatist infighting. Zakharchenko "received injuries incompatible with life as a result of an explosion in the centre of Donetsk", the separatist administration said in a statement. It added that the blast also injured Alexander Timofeyev, the deputy prime minister of the self-proclaimed republic. Russian President Vladimir Putin called the killing a "dastardly" crime aimed at destabilising a fragile regional peace. "I expect that the organisers and executors of this crime will get the deserved punishment," he said in a telegram of condolences released by the Kremlin. "Zakharchenko was with his colleagues at the cafe when the bomb went off," said Al Jazeera's Rory Challands, reporting from the Russian capital, Moscow. "He is the only confirmed fatality so far from that explosion." Challands added Donetsk was in lockdown following the blast. "Nobody is allowed in and nobody is allowed out," he said. Russia's Investigative Committee, the state body that handles major crimes, said it was treating the killing as "an act of international terrorism". Posted by: badanov 2018-09-01 |
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