Three Wagner PMC mercenaries arrested on suspicion of executing family of eight in Ukraine’s Makiivka

Three men arrested on suspicion of murdering a family of eight gipsies in the Ukrainian city of Makiivka are believed to be members of the Wagner PMC mercenary group.

Three suspects have reportedly been detained by law enforcement officials this evening, Tuesday, December 27, after the murder of a family of eight people in the city of Makiivka. Those arrested for the barbaric incident in Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) are suspected of being mercenaries belonging to the Wagner PMC.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the DPR posted on its telegram channel: “On December 26, at 21:15pm Moscow time, the duty unit of the Chervonogvardeisky district police department of Makiivka received a message about the discovery of the corpses of eight people, including four children, on the territory of one of the households. A Skoda car was stolen from the yard”.

As indicated by the department, on suspicion of committing this crime, law enforcement officers in hot pursuit detained three previously convicted residents of the Kalininsky micro-district. The detainees “confessed that they committed the crime out of mercenary motives, in order to steal a car and valuable property”, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the republic noted.

According to the Interior Ministry, the suspects could face capital punishment. “The actions of malefactors fall under the sanctions of Part 2 of Article 105 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation – ‘Murder of two or more persons’ – and entail the maximum responsibility in the form of capital punishment. An investigation is underway”, said the message, as reported by tass.ru.

All members of a family of eight, including three minors, were attacked by individuals armed with machine guns who later fled in a car. “A family of eight people has died, they were shot. Presumably with automatic weapons. Three children were among the dead”, the local administration said in a statement on Telegram.

All of the victims were shot in the head, including the children, who were aged one, seven, and nine. Petro Andriushchenko, an adviser to the mayor of the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol, writing on Telegram, claimed that: “This crime was openly racist in nature since it was a family of gipsy ethnicity that have been murdered. All the dead had bullet wounds to the head at point-blank range”.

Andriushchenko pointed out that the residents of Makiivka themselves reported that the crime had been committed by the military. He added that he and his team spent “most of last night monitoring public sources and working with first-hand information, and can state that this murder was committed by various monsters in military uniform.”

“But the occupiers will cover up the Russians’ crime, as they did all those committed in Mariupol, a city now under Moscow’s control”, he added.

He suggested that these crimes may continue, as Russia has recruited “not human beings, but criminals, neo-Nazis and other trash”, to fight on the front lines, referring to the group of mercenaries and prisoners Moscow has freed to deploy to Ukraine with the Wagner PMC.

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