According to an official, Ukrainian forces have buried hundreds of people in a mass grave in a commuter town outside the Ukrainian capital Kyiv after retaking control of the area from Russian forces.
“In Bucha we have already buried 280 people in mass graves,” Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk told the AFP news agency on Saturday.
He said the streets of the badly damaged city were littered with bodies.
“All these people were shot in the back of the head, killed,” Fedoruk said.
He said the victims were men and women, and he also saw a 14-year-old boy among the dead.
The mayor also confirmed to Al Jazeera that he had seen at least 22 bodies on the streets of Bucha.
He said it had not yet been possible to collect the bodies due to fears that Russian forces had booby-trapped the bodies.
“[Fedoruk] claims that this was a deliberate target by Russian soldiers — essentially a massacre of civilians in his city,” said Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride, reporting from Lviv in western Ukraine.
Bucha has seen heavy fighting in recent weeks and was under Russian occupation for about a month before being recaptured this week.
“According to the mayor [the dead people] were trying to flee into Ukrainian-held territory when he said they were simply gunned down,” McBride said.
He said Ukraine’s Defense Ministry accused Russia of killing civilians in other cities.
“[The ministry] say that while they advance and the Russians retreat, they are reclaiming territory, and it seems that in places like Bucha, and perhaps other cities, there may well be even more grisly discoveries waiting to be uncovered,” said McBride.
David DesRoches, a professor at Washington’s National Defense University, told Al Jazeera that killing civilians intentionally is a war crime.
“Placing booby traps and mines is a clear violation of the laws of war, as is deliberately attacking civilians,” he said.
Brovary taken again
Ukrainian forces have also recaptured the town of Brovary, 20 km (12 miles) east of the capital, Mayor Ihor Sapozhko said in a televised address Friday night.
Businesses reopened and residents returned, but “still stand ready to defend their city,” he added.
“The Russian occupiers have now left practically the entire Brovary district,” Sapozhko said. “This evening, [Ukrainian] Armed forces will work to clear settlements [remaining] Occupants, military equipment and possibly mines.”
A prominent Ukrainian photojournalist who went missing from a combat zone near the capital last month was found dead on Friday in the village of Huta Mezhyhirska, north of Kyiv, the country’s Prosecutor General’s Office said.
Maks Levin, 40, has worked as a photojournalist and videographer for many Ukrainian and international publications.
The attorney general’s office attributed his death to two shots allegedly fired by the Russian military and said an investigation was ongoing.