Ukrainian far-right activist shot dead by police

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/25/ukrainian-far-right-activist-shot-dead

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A prominent Ukrainian far-right activist, part of a hardline nationalist movement that played a leading role in the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych, has been shot dead by police.

The interior ministry said officers from the Sokol special unit had killed Oleksander Muzychko, also known as Sashko Bily, as he tried to escape from a cafe in the western Ukrainian region of Rivne on Monday night.

"At the moment of arrest, at shouts of 'Stop! Police!', Muzychko fled, jumping through a window and opened fire," the first deputy interior minister, Volodymyr Yevdokimov, told a news conference in Kiev. The officers returned fire, killing Muzychko, he said.

Muzychko was a member of the hardline Right Sector and the group's co-ordinator for western Ukraine, the country's nationalist heartland bordering the EU. Police said he was wanted for hooliganism and an attack on a local prosecutor.

Russia, which cited the likes of Right Sector as justification for its move to annex Crimea and protect the peninsula's ethnic Russian majority from Ukrainian "fascists", said this month that Muzychko was under investigation for fighting alongside rebels in Chechnya in the 1990s.

Contradicting the police account, the independent MP Oleksander Doniy said on his Facebook page that Muzychko had been executed. Muzychko had previously said he feared the police would kill him.

"Two vehicles cut off his car. He was dragged out and put in one of them. Then he was thrown on the ground, hands cuffed behind his back, two shots to the heart," Doniy wrote, without saying where he got his information.

Yanukovych triggered peaceful street protests in late November by making a U-turn away from the EU and towards closer ties with Russia. Right Sector raised the protests to a new level in January by attacking police vehicles with petrol bombs and bricks. It provided much of the muscle as clashes with police grew more serious.

Yanukovych fled in February after two days of gun battles between police and protesters in which 95 people were killed.

The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh has said he plans to run for president in elections on 25 May, but he is a rank outsider.