Interfax: Ukraine rebels’ reports of “mass grave” of 400 a “misunderstanding”, leader says

(Interfax – Moscow, October 1, 2014) Sources in the self-proclaimed Donetsk people’s republic [DPR] have specified that the burial site on the outskirts of Makeyevka [a settlement in east Ukraine] only contained the remains of 9 people, while the 400 unidentified bodies the republic’s authorities spoke about earlier came to morgues from different parts of the region.

“We were misunderstood and the information was distorted as a result. We said that 400 is the overall number of unidentified bodies remaining in Donetsk morgues. Ninety per cent of them belong to civilians who were killed at different times. Many of the bodies are mutilated and are hard to identified. We have therefore turned to Russian experts with a request to conduct DNA tests,” DPR’s first deputy premier Andrey Purgin [Andriy Purhin] told Interfax on Wednesday [1 October].

As for the burial site on the outskirts of Makeyevka, only nine bodies were found there, he stressed.

According to Purhin, the people were killed by Ukrainian military units.

“A battalion of the National Guard, as it was leaving the settlement, has destroyed a township-forming enterprise – the mine. They used tanks to shoot at the mine shaft. Later, five people, nine of whom were militia members and the rest, ostensibly, civilians, were executed near the mine. Their hands were tied together with duct tape. They were executed very brutally, almost entire magazines were shot into some of the bodies,” Purhin said.

Purhin has said earlier that about 400 bodies were currently at morgues in Donetsk and nearby cities controlled by the DPR. “There are currently 400 bodies at morgues now, 350 of them are civilians, many of them are such in a state that it is difficult to identify them,” Purhin told journalists on 29 September.

He also explained then that “the bodies were found at different sites, which are currently under the militia’s control but were controlled by Ukrainian security forces before”. Some of the bodies were found in spontaneous burial sites, Purhin said.

He also added that the DPR’s authorities were planning to request Russian experts to identify the bodies using DNA tests.