Kharkiv protesters used grenades - Ukraine acting president
KYIV. April 8 (Interfax) - Ukraine's acting president and parliament speaker, Oleksandr Turchynov, claims that protesters used weapons as they were cleared by police from the regional administration building in the city of Kharkiv, as a result of which several policemen were injured.
"As the building of the regional administration was freed in Kharkiv, the separatists used both weapons and hand grenades against police officers," Turchynov said at a parliamentary session on Kyiv on Tuesday morning.
The acting president, however, declined to say exactly how many policemen were injured, adding that some of them were in serious condition.
Hopefully, the building of the Ukrainian Security Service's branch in Luhansk and the Donetsk regional administration headquarters will be cleared of protesters soon, he said.
"The attempts made by the separatists to stage provocations in Dnipropetrovsk and the Mykolayiv region have been contained. I express my sincere gratitude to the officers of security structures who professionally fulfilled their duties," Turchynov said.
Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, for his part, said that three officers had been injured during the clashes between police and pro-Russian protesters in Kharkiv.
"The Kharkiv night was infinitely long. Fire was set to the lobby of the regional administration building after the separatists' attacks on it had been rebuffed for the whole of the previous day. The attackers pelted National Guard soldiers with stun grenades. Unarmed policemen guarding [the building] were attacked with non-lethal weapons," Avakov said on his Facebook page on Tuesday morning.
Policemen were ordered to extinguish the fire and ensure the security of firefighters working at the site, the minister said.
"Having taken advantage of the National Guard's focus on extinguishing the fire in the left wing of the regional administration headquarters, the separatists broke into the building smashing windows in the opposite wing of the building. There were some 200 of them," he said.
Police managed to clear the protesters from the building at around 6:30 a.m., the minister said.
"Not a single shot was fired. Grenades and other special-purpose means were not used either. Seventy people were detained. Weapons were confiscated. Separatist group leader [Yehor] Loginov was among those detained," he added.