Oleksiy Grytsenko, the activist whom journalist Tetiana Chornovol called on the night she was beaten, informed Hromadske TV that on December 24 Tetiana went to take photos of the mansions of the Minister of Internal Affairs and the Prosecutor General.
On the eve of December 25, unidentified men assaulted the journalist and EuroMaidan activist Tetiana Chornovol, Ukrainska Pravda reports.
The assault took place in Boryspil. According to Chornovol, she was taking a turn to the village Gora, where she lives, when she noticed she was being tailed. She took a sharp turn back to Boryspil, but the car that followed her started to push her car to the roadside and rammed it several times. She stopped the car. Two men ran out of the pursuing car and broke the back window of her car. She jumped out of the car and tried to escape, but they caught her and started beating her and then just left her in a ditch.
According to the police, on December 25 at 0.40 a.m. outside the city on the Kyiv-Boryspil road police officers found a car on a roadside. Not far from it in a ditch they saw an injured woman and they provided her with first aid.
The police investigative unit arrived to the site and identified the injured woman as Chornovol. She was not able to describe the attackers. The police brought her to the hospital where she was diagnosed with a concussion, numerous bruises, a broken nose and several fractures, and she was not able to walk by herself; she was taken into surgery to have stitches to her face. She will require more surgeries.
Her relatives received a call about her from the hospital. At 4 a.m. she was transferred to an an intensive care unit in a hospital in Kyiv.
Oleksiy Grytsenko, the activist whom Tetiana called on that night, informed Hromadske TV that on December 24 Tetiana went to take photos of the mansions of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Vitaliy Zakharchenko, and the Prosecutor General, Victor Pshonka. During her last assignment she was being followed. Tetiana managed to post the information about Zakharchenko’s mansion on her blog on the Ukrainska Pravda website.
Chornovol’s car was equipped with a dashboard camera, and EuroMaidan activists took it to analyze the recording. According to Grytsenko, the preliminary analysis showed that there were three men in that car and the brand of the vehicle and its registration number are visible.
A police investigation under part 2 Article 296 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (‘Hooliganism’) is in process. The local police have invited eyewitnesses to the incident to share their testimonies.
