In Boutcha, local residents found steel darts on the ground, but also on bodies. First used during World War I, this non-banned weapon is capable of causing damage.
weapon arrows? In the Boutcha region – a town that was a martyrdom during the war in Ukraine where many civilians were killed or even tortured – the presence of small metal arrows has been observed in certain places.
“We found several very beautiful nail-like objects in the bodies of both men and women,” Vladyslav Pirovskyi, a Ukrainian coroner, told British newspaper The Guardian. He adds that several of his colleagues have made the same observation on other bodies in the area.
On site, the Washington Post journalists also noted the presence of these pointed metal pieces of a few centimeters on the ground.
“If you look in my garden, you’ll find a lot of them,” a Boutcha resident told them.
She says she found these sharp projectiles on the roof of her car in late March after an intense night of bombing.
“The grenades explode in the air and the darts are thrown”
These darts are 2 to 4 cm long steel projectiles with a sharp point at the front and four fins at the back. This type of weapon is not new and was already used during the First World War, as recalled by the site of the Australian National Memorial, which explains that the French were the first to use these small pieces of iron in 1914. followed by the British and the Germans.
“Darts were dropped from airplanes or airships in large numbers, each canister containing between 20 and 250 darts,” back then.
Today we are more likely to speak of thousands of darts fired simultaneously with grenades. “Arrow grenades, typically fired from tanks, contain between 5000 and 8000. The grenades explode in mid-air and the darts are projected in a cone over an area approximately 300 meters by 100 meters,” Amnesty International explained in 2014. These weapons are ” intended for use in pursued infantry attacks or against forces operating in open terrain” and can be deadly.
“The principle is to fill grenades with thousands of small darts from 2 to 4 cm with small fins. You shoot the grenade from a long distance, and then the grenade explodes at a certain height and spreads at a very high speed and with a lot energy all these arrows that will water about three soccer fields”, explained on CNEWS Bruno Clermont, General of the Luftwaffe Corps.
Authorized to use this ammunition
Weapons that can cause serious harm to civilians but are not prohibited by international conventions.
“We are talking about ammunition approved for war, this is ammunition that is in use in certain armies, not in the French army,” explains General Bruno Clermont.
In 2014, at the beginning of the Donbass war in Ukraine, arrows of this type were found on the wounded. Amnesty International had also previously pointed the finger at Israel for using this type of deadly weapon. The organization states that it has “gathered information showing that Israel used these weapons, particularly during Operation Cast Lead [2008-2009]. Civilians, including children, were killed.”
In 2008, Fadel Shana, a 24-year-old cameraman working for Reuters news agency, “was killed by multiple arrows that burst from a shell fired by an Israeli tank,” according to Reuters. Eight other civilians, aged between 12 and 20, were killed by the gunfire and seven others, aged between 10 and 18, were injured. The Israeli army had concluded that the fatal shot was justified because the soldiers believed the camera was a weapon at the time.
“Never used in densely populated areas”
Unless international humanitarian law specifically prohibits darts, darts should never be used in densely populated areas,” Amnesty International said.
In fact, any weapon, even a legal one, can be the cause of a war crime. In the case of Ukraine and Boutcha, the use of these darts per se is not prohibited, it is the use by the Russian army that can be singled out as it appears that targeting civilians is prohibited.
According to the rules of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, war crimes are defined as “the intentional directing of attacks against the civilian population as such or against civilians not directly involved in hostilities” or “the fact of intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, i.e. objects that are not military targets”.
In Boutcha, investigators are gathering evidence and information about the numerous war crimes that Russia has been accused of following its invasion. The aim is to identify and convict the perpetrators of these acts.
Salomé Vincendon Journalist BFMTV