A municipal representative threw live grenades into his colleagues on Friday, at a local council meeting of a Transcarpathian village.
According to the Ukrainian police, one person died as a result of the explosion, and 26 others were injured, six of them in a serious condition.
Based on the video posted on the Facebook page of the authorities, the man walked into the hall during the council meeting and then pulled out the hand grenades one by one from his coat pockets. He secured it, then threw it among the people in the room with a surprisingly calm movement. The grenades exploded almost immediately, and the shocking video footage ends with people screaming and a cloud of smoke covering the room.
All this happened in the Kereckei (Lerecki) village council building on Friday morning. According to kiszó.net, the municipal representative who detonated the hand grenades lost his life during the detonation, while 11 people were taken to the hospital.
Mukachevo.net journalists visited the village, where they learned that the grenade
it was blown up by Szerhij Batrin, a 54-year-old representative of the village council, belonging to the Servant of the People party.
The central figure of the party is Volodymyr Zelenskyi, who announced in December 2017 that he will run as the party's candidate in the 2019 Ukrainian presidential elections. The name of the party is the same as the title of the famous television film series in which Zelensky, who was still an actor at the time, played a history teacher-turned-president.
The employees of the village council told what happened in the first minutes after the explosion. First they heard an explosion and screams, then the secretary of the village council ran out covered in blood, after which the women immediately called an ambulance. The man was previously engaged in passenger transport. It is also known that Batrin is a member of the law enforcement and parliamentary ethics committee.
According to local residents, Szerhij Batrin was an activist and opposed the leader of the Kerecke community.
"The representative had a conflict with the local authorities over the distribution of land. He created his own political group and did not allow us to work”
- said Petro Matiko, a local resident, adding that the issue of the village leader's report and the election of the secretary were on the agenda in recent days.
"He often posted on Facebook about complaints about his work and about financial issues, saying that money is not properly distributed, not directed to the right places.
He was basically an activist, but I never dreamed he would do something like this."
Matiko said.
Featured Image: Facebook
