GENEVA, March 25 (Reuters) – The head of the UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine said on Friday that UN observers were receiving more and more information about the presence of Mass graves in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol besieged by Russian forces.
One of these mass graves would contain around 200 bodies, said Matilda Bogner during a videoconference. Some of the information collected by the UN comes from the analysis of satellite images, she said.
UN official says more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russian invasion began a month ago, and monitoring mission she leads works to document indiscriminate attacks led by both sides.
UN observers have notably gathered information on civilians killed by Russian forces while trying to flee Mariupol by car, as well as on the forced disappearance of Ukrainian officials who would be taken hostage, indicated Matilda Bogner.
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is also investigating allegations of forcible transfer of civilian population from Mariupol to Russia, she added.
With Mariupol completely surrounded and shelled by Russian forces, it is difficult to know independently what is going on there.
On Friday, the port city’s municipality said it had collected testimonies that some 300 people were killed in the March 16 bombing of the city’s drama theatre, whose basement was used as a shelter for population.
The municipality said in a press release that it was unable to provide a consolidated balance sheet itself.
About 130 people were pulled alive from the rubble of the theater, Ukrainian authorities said in the days after the bombing, but the number of people trapped in the basement has not been established with certainty.
Authorities in Kyiv accused the Russian military of carrying out an airstrike against the theatre, which Moscow denied, saying it did not target civilians and blaming the blast on the “Azov Battalion”, a unit incorporated during the 2014 war in the Donbass of neo-Nazi militants, and who has since been integrated into the Ukrainian national guard.
(Report Emma Farge in Geneva, with the office of Lviv, French version Tangi Salaün)