Police Blame Opposition in Ukraine Attack
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - Ukrainian police accused five suspects in the savage beating of a local journalist of having links to the opposition, just as reporter Tetyana Chornovol suggested she was attacked for documenting the opulence of Ukraine's political elite.
The conflicting accusations on Friday came days after Chornovol, 34, was chased down by a car and beaten, an incident that threatened to breathe new life into dwindling anti-government protests.
"In the course of the investigation it was established that the detained had been in close contact with members of the party UDAR," Mykola Chynchyn, the head of the main investigations department, said in a statement posted by Ukraine's Interior Ministry.
Instead of conducting an objective investigation and finding who really ordered and carried out the beating... (the ministry) turns to provocation and effectively tries to conceal the criminals, Al Jazeera reported.
UDAR, or Punch, is led by heavyweight boxing champion Vitaly Klitschko, the most prominent of several opposition leaders who have seized on the public outcry over the government's rejection of closer ties with the European Union.
Chornovol, meanwhile, told pro-opposition television station Channel 5 that "a price" had been placed on her life, suggesting the attack was "revenge" for her anti-government work.
With tents and braziers against the winter cold, a core group of hundreds of protesters has been occupying Kiev's central Independence Square for weeks.
The protests have shown signs of losing steam, with turnout at weekly mass rallies down since the height of the backlash in late November and early December, when hundreds of thousands of people packed downtown Kiev.
After the attack on Chornovol, hundreds of opposition protesters called upon the Interior Minister to resign, and another rally was planned for Sunday.
The attack came just hours after Chornovol posted pictures on her blog of a country home she said belonged to Interior Minister Vitaly Zakharchenko.
