Two people were killed and nine others injured in a court in the city of Nikopol, where a homicide trial was under way when the father of one of the victims fired two grenades at the perpetrators.
The court was examining the case of the murder of two young men in 2016, a crime most likely related to drug trafficking, according to the announcement of the local police authorities. During the hearing, the father of one of the victims fired two grenades, killing himself and injuring ten people. Among the injured were three of the accused. One of them succumbed to his injuries shortly afterwards, at the hospital where he had been taken.
This tragedy brings to the fore again the problem of arms trafficking in Ukraine, which worsened after the outbreak, in April 2014, of the armed conflict between the pro-Russian guerrillas and the Ukrainian armed forces in the eastern provinces of the country.
In November, Kiev police announced that they had arrested two men who had 6,5 kilograms of explosives hidden in their car. At the same time, in the Donetsk region, police located a vehicle carrying hundreds of missiles and six grenades. In Odessa, in the south, a man was arrested on charges of smuggling weapons from the war zone.