KIEV (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 21st April, 2019) The Ukrainian police are verifying a number of reports of bomb threats in several sites across the country amid the presidential runoff that is being held in Ukraine on Sunday.
The Ukrainian National Police said that it had received messages about bomb threats in an airport, a business hotel and two malls in the city of Kharkiv.
"Information that explosives had been planted at the international airport, a business hotel on Independence Avenue, shopping centers on Sumska and the Heroes of Labor streets was received by the police on April 21 at about 13:00 p.m. [10:00 a.m. GMT]," the police said in a statement.
The police added that about 5,600 people were evacuated from the airport and one of the malls, but no explosives were found during a series of checks.
Oleksandr Fatsevych, deputy head of the the country's National Police, said that the police also received a report about a bomb scare at a polling place in the Donetsk Region.
Later in the day, the Interior Ministry said that the police had not found any explosives at the polling place in the Donetsk Region and it resumed its work. However, Ivan Varchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister, said that reports of bomb scare continued to come from the region's territory that was not controlled by the Ukrainian central government.
The Ukrainian police also said that it had evacuated around 700 people from the Lviv International Airport and 100 people from a hotel complex in Odessa amid bomb scares on Sunday, however, no explosives were found at both sites.
Polling places opened at 8:00 a.m. (05:00 GMT) on Sunday in Ukraine marking the start of the second round of the presidential election. According to opinion polls, conducted ahead of the runoff, incumbent President Petro Poroshenko is supported by about 25 percent of voters, while his opponent Volodymyr Zelenskiy by about 70 percent.
