Police station stormed after officers accused of rape
Ukraine’s president ordered a top-level inquiry after a
night of violence in a small southern town in which people
angered by the rape of a local woman in which they said police
were involved attacked a police headquarters with petrol bombs.
The protests were prompted by suspicions one of the policemen
involved was being protected because of family connections.
Several hundred people took to the streets in Vradiyevka, 400
km south of the capital Kyiv, after reports circulated of the
attack on a 29-year-old shop assistant who said she was
beaten and raped by two policemen after being grabbed on a
street and forced into a taxi.
Video footage at the scene showed police cowering back as
mobs tried to force their way into the main police building
and used metal bars to beat in windows and a metal perimeter
fence. Police used what appeared to be pepper-spray to force
them back.
Part of the building was ablaze in the early hours of Tuesday
after petrol bombs were thrown. Angry crowds were still
demonstrating in the town in mid-afternoon despite a visit by
the regional governor to calm them.
“What happened last night is a wake-up call,” Vitaly
Klitschko, the world boxing champion-turned-politician, told
parliament which interrupted a discussion on European
integration to hear reports on the overnight unrest.
“The impunity of law enforcement authorities has caused a
people’s rebellion,” Klitschko said.
President Viktor Yanukovich, who is already at odds with the
EU over the jailing of his main political opponent former
prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, told security chiefs
urgently to investigate the incidents and violence.
Authorities announced that the regional prosecutor as well as
the heads of the regional and town police had been sacked.
Her face swollen and disfigured by bruising, Iryna Krashkova
told a television channel from her hospital bed that she had
been grabbed late at night on June 26 as she walked home from
a discotheque.
She was driven into woods and raped by two policemen, both of
whom she knew by sight, while a taxi driver stood by and did
nothing. “They wrenched off my ear rings and threw me out of
the car,” she said.
Interior Minister Vitaly Zakharchenko pledged to carry out a
“fast, full and unbiased investigation”.
He confirmed that one policeman and the taxi driver had been
detained. But he said a second policeman whom Krashkova had
identified had not been arrested because records showed he
had been on duty at the time which suggested he could not
have taken part in the crime.
He said however there would be an expert investigation into
all the circumstances.
He acknowledged that local police had tried to minimise the
affair by initially recording the attack as a minor one
involving only slight injuries to the victim. His office had
reacted slowly because of “poor information” from regional
police.
In a similar gang-rape in March 2012 in the Ukrainian
provinces, Oksana Makar, 18, died after being raped,
half-strangled and then set on fire.
That crime also sparked street protests when police initially
released two of her three suspected attackers because their
parents had good political connections. The three men were
subsequently re-arrested, convicted and are now serving jail
sentences.