Bucha, Ukraine:
Nearly 300 people are buried in a mass grave in Bucha, a commuter town outside the Ukrainian capital Kiev, the mayor told AFP on Saturday after the Ukrainian army recaptured control of the main city from Russia.
“In Bucha, we have already buried 280 people in mass graves,” Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk told AFP by phone. He said the streets of the badly destroyed city are littered with corpses.
AFP saw at least 20 bodies – men in civilian clothes – on a single street in Bucha on Saturday.
“All these people were shot, in the back of the head,” Fedoruk said.
He said the victims were men and women and that he had seen a 14-year-old boy among the dead.
Many of the bodies had white bandages “to show they were unarmed,” he said.
The city still had cars in the streets with “whole families killed: children, women, grandmothers, men,” he added.
The bodies were still on the streets because sappers have not yet worked there, Fedoruk said.
He claimed that some of the victims had attempted to cross the Buchanka River into Ukraine-controlled territory and had been killed.
“These are the consequences of the Russian occupation,” he said.
He said it was not possible to say how many civilians had died in fighting with Russian troops.
Authorities will clean up the corpses after the sappers give them the green light in “three or four days,” he said.
Ukrainian forces regained control of Bucha this week. The city had been inaccessible for nearly a month because it was in the hands of Russian troops.
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