A man named Boris Yavorsky has posted on his Live Journal blog "Ethereal Station" answers to questions people have about the victims of the Odessa fire.
It's on his blog, where he has his Half-Life game avatar, and is informal and not official, but he is a morgue worker — so that gives it some credibility. I found out his title: forensic medical pathologist, head of the department of the Odessa Regional Bureau for Forensic Medicine (which is at per. Valikhovsky 4, in Odessa).
I don't have time to translate it now, but some highlights:
1. He can't tell us the nationalities/citizenships of the people who died in the fire. That's because it's against the law to divulge such information. Under Ukrainian law, citizenship of a homocide victim is considered a matter of privacy. After the prosecutor is done with the investigation of a crime and the autopsy is complete, the bodies of victims and the certificate with the cause of death are turned over to relatives. It's up to them to decide to publicize the details then. Various informal lists with causes of death have already been leaked — but Yavorsky is not budging on answering this question — he doesn't want to lose his job.
2. Five of the victims of the day's violence, which includes shooting victims during the parade and outside the Trade Unions Building and 36 who died in the fire inside, have not been identified. Are these the same five found shot dead outside the building? Or? He doesn't say — and they aren't necessarily. Naturally, one wonders if the five are Russian or Transdnestria citizens and these countries/regions aren't coming forward to claim any bodies because they might look bad. But we don't know anything yet.
3. None of the victims was a pregnant woman — this was a mistaken notion that arose from the appearance on social media of a photo with a view of one of the victims who was flung back over a desk. She was a middle-aged woman who was a worker in the building and not pregnant.
4. There are only the 36 victims inside the building — apparently one of the biggest rumors in Odessa that the authorities have had to address is the notion that there are "100" or "300" or whatever numbers of bodies still in the building. He insists there are not. Very graphically, he points out that if there were hundreds of dead people still in that building, you'd smell it all the way downtown. You don't. Therefore, stop spreading the rumor. He answers this question multiple times — the building is big, tall, and burnt, but people have gone all through it and the crime scene was open to the public unfortunately and many people filmed it or saw it. The bodies are removed, full stop.
5. He can't say anything yet about the question of whether there were poison gases uses, i.e. not carbon monoxide from the fire, but some kind of poison spray. The analysis for toxins is still underway with tissue samples.
6. He also rejects the idea that there are dead bodies moved somewhere else — again, the smell — and rejects the idea that they are in some other morgue — they aren't. They are only in his morgue.
That's all we get from Boris, basically, and we should be grateful for that much but of course what people want and have a right to know is:
o cause of death
o citizenship
There have been a few public funerals photographed with photos uploaded to Demotix and other sites — let's say about 3 or 4. All of people native to Odessa, either on the pro-Kiev side (a policeman) or the pro-Russian side (several young men, in their 20s or 40s). But no one has reported any kind of comprehensive list of the issue of nationalities anywhere I've seen.
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