DPR Ombudswoman Says Sent Letters to UN, OSCE, ICRC Over Ukraine's Secret Jail in Mariupol
Daria Morozova, the human rights commissioner of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), told Sputnik that she had sent queries to the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to verify the recent information about a Kiev-run secret prison in the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupo
DONETSK (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 18th April, 2019) Daria Morozova, the human rights commissioner of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), told Sputnik that she had sent queries to the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to verify the recent information about a Kiev-run secret prison in the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
At a press conference in Moscow in March, an ex-officer of the Security Service of Ukraine, Vasily Prozorov, said that Kiev had secret prisons in the area of its anti-terrorist operation (ATO) in Donbas. One of such facilities is supposedly located at the Mariupol airfield, where people were tortured and killed as of January 2017. According to Prozorov, more than 300 people passed through this prison in summer-autumn 2014, with two people known to have died over this period.
According to Morozova, she has sent "relevant letters to international organizations for a monitoring whether this [prison] still exists in Ukraine at the moment," namely "the ICRC, the OSCE mission and the Office of the UN [High Commissioner] for Human Rights.
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The ombudswoman expressed surprise over lack of any reaction from the international community to the recent revelations.
"I have a question for the international community � where is a reaction to this? There is no reaction," she said.
Morozova suggested that the prison was still functioning.
"As of December 27, 2017, when we had a very large [prisoner] exchange, it 100 percent existed. A lot of former prisoners of war say that they were also kept there. They went through all these atrocities," she noted.
According to Morozova, the DPR is currently concerned over the fate of 254 Donbas residents, who are believed to be kept in Ukraine. Kiev, has, meanwhile, confirmed the whereabouts of 98 of them, while the rest of the people have still been unaccounted for.