The presidential race turned bloody Oct. 2 when two men tossed hand grenades into a crowd gathered around candidate Natalia Vitrenko, who was campaigning in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast town of Inhulets.
Police said 33 people were injured – two critically – by the explosion. Vitrenko herself received shrapnel wounds to her stomach and legs, and underwent minor surgery in Kyiv on Oct. 3. Vitrenko’s supporters say at least 47 people were injured.
Two men were arrested shortly after the attack, police said. One of the suspects said he was indirectly connected to the Moroz campaign. Police did not release their names, describing them only as Russian residents, both from Rostov.
Vitrenko was leaving an indoor rally and was walking to her car parked nearby when the grenades exploded.
According to Natalia Sokurenko, a Vitrenko campaigner who witnessed the violence, the first grenade went flying precisely in the direction of Vitrenko’s head, but hit the head of her tall bodyguard and changed trajectory.
It exploded several meters away and wounded Vitrenko, her close party associate Volodymyr Marchenko, and other people around. Marchenko received several wounds to his arm and leg and also underwent surgery.
Vitrenko’s second bodyguard pushed her backward, toward the building and away from the second grenade.
At an Oct. 6 press conference, Vitrenko and her colleagues who survived the attack condemned it as a planned terrorist act aimed to kill her.
‘It’s very obvious to us that it was a political order to kill me,’ she told several hundred journalists who gathered to see her first press conference after the attack.
According to police, a total of 18 people were hospitalized in the nearby city of Kryvi Rih. Two of the wounded were in serious condition, and two others were listed in critical condition, their doctor in a Kryvi Rih hospital said Oct. 3.
One woman lost a foot, one man lost an eye, and many others received serious head injuries, Vitrenko said.
Vitrenko said that the wounded were mostly her party colleagues who came to hear her speak, and who were leaving the building after a rally where an estimated 1,000 people had gathered.
‘Many people were thrown aside by the shock wave,’ Vitrenko told the Associated Press TV. ‘I was saved by those who surrounded me.’
The explosives used were RGD-5 grenades, capable of killing within a five-meter range, according to the Interior Ministry. The time of ignition is about four seconds.
According to Viktor Tsedorenko, the Interior Ministry spokesman, the two suspects confessed to the attack. One of the suspects told the ministry that he received the grenades from the girlfriend of his brother, Serhy Inavnchenko, who heads the election headquarters of another presidential candidate, Oleksandr Moroz. Ivanchenko himself remains at large, according to Fedorenko.
‘He has disappeared, and is now wanted by the police,’ Fedorenko said.
The police made no attempt to seek the public’s help in the search and did not ask the media to show his picture.
Vitrenko started her political career in Moroz’s Socialist party in 1991, and was his aide on economic issues for some time. She broke with Moroz in early 1997 and accused him of ‘betraying Marxist ideas.’
Interior Minister Yury Kravchenko said that there is only one version of the terrorist act that they are investigating, and it’s connected with Moroz and his fleeing staffer from Kryvi Rih.
Many politicians and even some Interior Ministry officials were suspicious about the apparent simplicity of the case and its obvious ties to Moroz, and said that the ministry should not have made public the confessions of the detained suspects.
‘These are the kinds of things that should be checked thoroughly,’ said Oleksandr Zarubytsky, head of the ministry’s Public Relations Department. ‘When somebody says something like this, it could easily be a provocation, they can just be pretending to be who they say they are.’ Moroz also denied any involvement with the case.
‘I hope the Ukrainian people will not be fooled so easily, and will think carefully who benefits from such a provocation,’ he told his fellow deputies during a parliamentary hearing on Sept. 5.
Regardless of his denial, pro-presidential forces speculated that Moroz’s local headquarters had committed the crime, possibly without his personal knowledge. Other presented theories that pro-Kuchma forces were involved to stain Moroz’s reputation.
Some people even voiced a theory that Vitrenko planned the terrorist act herself to boost her own popularity, and drew parallels with Russian President Boris Yeltsin who had allegedly been thrown off the bridge during his 1996 election campaign. All three candidates denied those speculations.
Yevhen Marchuk, a former KGB general and another presidential candidate, said that an investigation should be initiated into whether Vitrenko’s guards did their job properly. Under the law, all presidential candidates are supposed to be guarded by special guards of the Interior Ministry.
‘Of course, we have to find out how well the state guards were performing all the measures to do with her security, or … whether they just followed her,’ he said.
President Leonid Kuchma ordered tightened security of presidential candidates immediately after the attack, the Interfax new agency reported.
The State Security Service and the General Prosecutor’s office were ordered to investigate the attack. Parliament also set up its own investigation commission.
The Progressive Socialist faction refused to participate in the commission, and Vitrenko herself said her party would carry out its own investigation.
‘We don’t believe that [either of the investigations] would be objective,’ she told a press conference.
