War in Ukraine: French gendarmes and forensic doctors sent to the field
Gendarme of the Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie (IRCGN) (Illustration image).
© AFP - VALERY HACHE
Text by: RFI Follow
2 mins
Massacres of civilians have marked the conflict in Ukraine in recent days.
The country's attorney general is already trying to collect evidence of these "
war crimes
" to present to the International Criminal Court, which is leading the investigation.
France has also sent experts to Lviv, in the west of the country.
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The fifteen French gendarmes accompanied by two forensic doctors will begin their investigation on Tuesday.
Arrived on Monday in Lviv, they are now in Boutcha to determine the nature of the crimes against civilians, of which hundreds of bodies were discovered after the departure of Russian troops who had occupied the city for a month.
Members of the Institute for Criminal Research of the National Gendarmerie (IRCGN), these crime scene and victim identification experts will work with the Ukrainian authorities and will surely contribute to the
work of the International Criminal Court (ICC)
.
They will then call on their skills in ballistics, explosives or DNA and fingerprint processing to investigate the death of these civilians found in early April, some with their hands tied behind their backs, face down, with a bullet. in the neck.
"
The IRCGN is one of the only technical structures in Europe capable of projecting itself into a theater of operations in two hours
", whether it is a theater of war or a natural disaster, explains General Patrick Touron, commander of the judicial pole of the gendarmerie.
The mission of these experts has an “
indefinite
” duration, but shifts are already planned.
"
As of Tuesday, they will be in Kiev, the place of their mission for the moment
," continued General Touron.
This is the first international team of experts to be sent to the field to support the investigative work.
France wants to be active in the investigation of these possible Russian war crimes.
In the days to come, it will also present an initiative to the Council of the European Union to coordinate Member States' contributions to these investigations.
On Sunday, Ukrainian justice said that 1,222 people had been killed in the kyiv region since the start of the invasion, without specifying whether they were only civilians.
The images of twenty corpses dressed in civilian clothes on a street in Boutcha, in the north-west of kyiv, have gone around the world, the Ukrainian authorities denouncing a "war crime" by the Russian army.
The Kremlin, for its part, assures us that it is a "staging" orchestrated by the Ukrainians and intended to harm it.
(
And with
AFP)
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