Death toll from Russian strike on Kharkiv DIY shop rises to 14
- A Russian bomb struck a home-improvement superstore in Kharkiv on Saturday, killing several people and wounding dozens, a Ukrainian regional governor said
- Russia’s TASS state news agency cited a security source claiming that a missile strike destroyed a ‘military store and command post’ inside the shopping centre
The death toll from Russian strikes on a hardware store in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv rose to 14 Sunday, the regional governor said as rescuers searched the charred debris for bodies.
“The number of dead has grown to 14,” Oleg Synegubov, Kharkiv regional governor, said on Telegram, as nearly 200 rescuers worked at the scene.
Interior minister Igor Klymenko said earlier that 43 were injured and “16 people are considered missing”, after Russian strikes hit the Epitsentr superstore on Saturday, sparking a massive fire.
“It took more than 16 hours to extinguish a fire in a Kharkiv construction hypermarket caused by targeted Russian strikes,” he said on Telegram. “Russian shelling killed 12 people and injured 43 others”.
Forensics experts and investigators were still working to identify bodies in the ruins of the Epitsentr DIY shop in the northeastern outskirts of the city, Klymenko said.
Earlier, the Kharkiv regional governor Oleg Synegubov said two of the people who had been killed worked in the hypermarket, adding that the city had been under “massive rocket fire all day”.