Eight people remain in hospital after Kyiv shooting, mayor says

By Anna Voitenko

KYIV, April 19 (Reuters) – Eight people, including a child, injured in a shooting that killed six people in Kiev, were hospitalized, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Sunday.

A Russian-born man opened fire on passersby with an automatic rifle on Saturday, then barricaded himself in a supermarket with hostages, where he was shot dead by police.

Police raided the supermarket after trying unsuccessfully to negotiate with the suspect for 40 minutes.

Klitschko said that the condition of the injured child, whose parents died in the attack, was in fair condition, while the condition of one of the adults was critical.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday that 14 people were injured in a shooting attack in the leafy Holosiivskyi district of the capital.

“They are all receiving all necessary medical care,” the mayor said on Telegram.

The supermarket has been cordoned off and remains closed. Bullet holes can be seen in the supermarket’s windows, and bloodstains can still be seen on the pavement and asphalt.

The flowers were left near a residential building a few hundred meters from the supermarket where the shooter shot his first victims.

“I saw people taking the children from the playground and running away. They shouted ‘Run, hide’. People didn’t understand what was happening. “They said there was a man there, a man shooting with a machine gun,” local resident Daryna, 31, told Reuters.

Another resident, a 73-year-old retiree, told Reuters that the man he saw shooting bystanders on Saturday “seemed a bit smart.”

“I don’t want to absolve him of crime or anything like that… but he didn’t look like a murderer.”

Such shootings are extremely rare in Ukraine, and the country’s security service said the incident was being investigated as an act of terrorism.

Police have not yet determined the cause of the crime.

(Additional reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Transcribing by Pavel Polityuk, Editing by Christina Fincher)