Seven wounded as gunmen hurl bomb at Ukraine’s Odessa checkpoint

Police has launched an investigation into a blast that went off at a checkpoint of armed gunmen from Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, in the Ukrainian Black Sea port city of Odessa. Gunmen hurled a bomb at the checkpoint from a car driving nearby, the regional police department told ITAR-TASS.

“The explosion occurred at 4.00 am local time on the road leading to Ovidiopol at one of largest wholesale marketplaces in the region. Wounded people affirmed that an explosive device was hurled at the checkpoint from a passing car. Seven people at the bonfire have got leg fragmentation wounds. All of them were taken to the city hospital, their life is not in danger,” the regional police department told ITAR-TASS.

“A group of detectives and operatives, bomb disposal technicians are investigating details of the blast at the crime scene,” the regional police department said.

Chief of the regional police department Petro Lutsyuk has demanded earlier that Odessa authorities should take away armed activists sent from Kiev as the latter destabilize the current situation in the region. “As a large number of people who were left in Kiev without supervision gathered in the city, it was decided to dispatch these formations to the city of Odessa. We do not need this. They came and created an unstable situation,” Lutsyuk said at a session of the regional council that opened on Thursday. In his words, the people “have set up 12 checkpoints in the region with an unclear legal status at which more than 500 people are on duty in shifts.”

Local media report numerous conflicts flaring up at these checkpoints. Odessa residents and guests of the city complain that they are stopped, checked and their money is extorted, meanwhile, numerous conflicts are sparking up that end in brawls, there were several incidents when glasses of checked cars were broken by clubs. Last week the police have spotted an arms depot in Odessa that belongs to radical nationalist organization Right Sector. The weapons depot contained cartridges, cold steel, clubs, incendiary bottles and smoke-puff charges .

Volodymyr Nemirovsky appointed as governor of Odessa Region by Kiev authorities spoke in protection of checkpoints which, in his view, “are needed to control police’s activity.”