At least six people have been killed and others injured after a person opened fire in Kyiv on Saturday, Ukrainian officials say.
The incident happened in the southern Holosiivskyi district. Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said the man, who lived locally, began shooting at people on the street and then took others hostage in a nearby supermarket.
Klymenko said the attacker was killed in the supermarket following a shoot-out with police. His motive is currently unclear.
The exact number of victims also remains unclear, but Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko said at least 15 people had been injured. Ten of these, including a child, had been taken to hospital.
Klitschko said most of the dead had been killed in the street. One woman, thought to be about 30 years old, later died in hospital.
Police negotiators spoke to the shooter for around 40 minutes while he was in the supermarket, Klymenko said. He described the man as “acting chaotically”.
“We tried to persuade him, realising that there was an injured person there,” he explained, adding that the attacker had not made any demands.
“We offered to bring in tourniquets to stop the bleeding and so on. But he did not respond, so the order was given to eliminate him, especially after he killed one of the hostages.”
Four hostages were later freed, according to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Ruslan Kravchenko, identified the shooter as a 58-year-old man from the Russian capital, Moscow, and said he had used an automatic weapon to carry out the fatal shooting.
The weapon used by the attacker was officially registered, officials said. The circumstances surrounding the issuing of the permit, as well as the shooting itself, are now being investigated.
A fire had broken out in the man’s apartment, officials said, following unconfirmed reports that he detonated an explosive device. Klitschko said the shooter had caused the fire.
While Kyiv is often subject to attacks during the ongoing war with Russia, shootings of this kind are rare in the city.
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