The images emerging from Boutcha, a Ukrainian town where dozens of corpses were discovered after the withdrawal of Russian troops, “point to deliberately targeted civilians“, said Tuesday, April 5 a spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
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War crime
“All signs point to the fact that the victims were deliberately targeted and killed directly. And this evidence is very disturbingsaid Elizabeth Throssell, during a regular UN press briefing in Geneva, pointing out that international humanitarian law prohibits the deliberate attack on civilians, which amounts to a war crime. “We have to investigate, but if we can understand that a building, for example, is hit in a military context, it is difficult to imagine what would be the military context of an individual lying in the street with a bullet in the head or have their bodies burned“, she pointed out. Elizabeth Throssell clarified that the High Commission itself did not currently have anyone on site in this town near kyiv.
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The dissemination in the international media of photos taken in this city and showing bodies in the street, some with their hands tied behind their backs or partially burned, as well as mass graves, provoked a wave of international condemnation. The Ukrainian authorities accuse the Russian soldiers of having massacred civilians, which Moscow denies, accusing the Ukrainian authorities of having staged the whole thing.
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