OHCHR Confirms Child In Donbas Died Of Combined Blast Trauma

(UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 08th April, 2021) Adds the OSCE monitoring mission's comment to Sputnik with quote in paras 4-5 - A combined blast trauma and fragmentation injuries resulted in the death of a four-year-old boy in the vicinity of Donetsk, UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Liz Throssell told Sputnik, following a visit by the UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine to the site of the child's death.

On April 2, four-year-old Vladislav Dmitriev was killed and his 66-year-old grandmother was injured in what locals claimed to be an attack of a Ukrainian army's strike drone. On Thursday, it was reported that the UN representatives had talked to the boy's relatives and examined the incident site together with representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic in the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination.

"Indeed, colleagues from the Donetsk office of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission today visited the location of the incident in the village of Oleksandrivske.

Information collected during the visit will inform further our analysis of the exact cause of the boy's death. At this stage, we can only confirm that he died because of combined blast trauma and fragmentation injuries," Throssell said.

The Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (SMM) said that it would continue investigating the circumstances of the boy's death.

"The SMM reported on 6 April on the incident, after conducting inquiries on 4, 5 and 6 April. It continued to follow up with an SMM patrol visiting the scene of the incident yesterday, 7 April," mission spokeswoman Dragana Nikolic-Solomon told Sputnik.

The Russian Investigative Committee has opened multiple criminal cases against the Ukrainian security forces over the shelling of Donbas in recent days.