Death toll in Ukraine’s Hroza hits 52, UN rights team to investigate

HROZA, Ukraine (Reuters) – The death toll from an air strike on the village of Hroza in northeastern Ukraine rose to 52 on Friday as rescue workers scoured the rubble for bodies after what Kyiv said was one of Moscow’s deadliest attacks on civilians since its invasion.

The latest victim died overnight in hospital, the regional governor said, following an attack in which a missile slammed into a cafe and grocery store on Thursday as people gathered to mourn a fallen Ukrainian soldier.

“Fifty-two people died as a result of this missile attack. One person died in a medical facility,” Oleh Synehubov, governor of the Kharkiv region, told Ukrainian television. “People are still there (in hospitals). The injuries are quite serious.”

Rescuers were still working at the scene, where bodies and body parts were found on Thursday among huge piles of bricks, wood and twisted metal.

A three-day mourning period was announced in the Kharkiv region after the deadliest attack there since Russia’s invasion more than 19 months ago. It was also one of the biggest civilian death tolls in any single Russian strike.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the missile strike, a U.N. spokesperson said on Thursday, noting that “attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure are prohibited under international humanitarian law”.

On Friday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights deployed a field team to investigate the attack, an OHCHR spokesperson said in Geneva.

The team will speak to survivors and gather information, OHCHR spokesperson Elizabeth Throssell  said.

“The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, who saw for himself the horrific impact of such strikes, is profoundly shocked and condemns these killings,” she said.

NEW AIR STRIKES

OCHR said it was likely that the missile was fired by Russia but that it was too early to say for certain.

“At this stage, it’s obviously very difficult to establish with absolute certainty what happened,” Throssell  said. “But given the location, given the fact that the cafe was struck, and the indications are that it was a Russian missile.”

Moscow denies deliberately targeting civilians, but many have been killed in attacks that have hit residential areas as well as energy, defence, port, grain and other facilities.

Russia also carried out new air strikes on Ukraine early on Friday, hitting the city of Kharkiv in the northeast and damaging grain and port infrastructure in the Odesa region in the south, Ukrainian officials said.

(Additional reporting by Olena Harmash, Editing by Timothy Heritage and Philippa Fletcher)