A group of unidentified persons has beaten in Zaporizhia the leader of the local civic movement Sober Backyards, Serhiy Mazurenko, who fights against a free sale of narcotic drugs in his city’s drugstores. The police have launched an investigation into the case.
Zaporizhia-based civil activist Andriy Lukin said Mazurenko was beaten in the street by a group of unidentified men armed with baseball bats and a hammer in the evening of Jan. 15. “Without saying a word, they beat him and run away. [He sustained] a fracture in one of his arms, multiple bruises and cuts, and a head trauma,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
Activists of the movement Sober Backyards wrote in social networks that one day before the incident Mazurenko had received a phone call from a stranger who, under a fictional pretext, asked him for a meeting in the Khortytsky district of Zaporizhia, where the latter was later attacked.
Earlier, in Zaporizhia, a group of activists of civil organizations tracked the free sale of narcotic drugs in drugstores, as a result of which they established there was a trade in narcotic drugs for tens of thousands of hryvnias that later were seized by the police. Trade was done without any prescriptions and age limits.
The press service of the Main Directorate of the National Police in the Zaporizhia region has confirmed the fact of the beating of a Zaporizhia civil activist, born in 1982, who was injured. Also, the police said that an investigative and operational group visited him at the hospital for interrogation purposes.
The investigation is underway. The police are deciding whether to open criminal proceedings under Article 122 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (intentional moderate bodily injury).
