By Valentyn Ogirenko
KYIV, April 18 (Reuters) – Ukrainian police killed a man alleged to have opened fire on Saturday at passersby in a Kyiv district before barricading himself into a supermarket with hostages and refusing to negotiate in an incident that killed six people.
Ukraine’s Security Service said the shooting was being investigated as a terrorist act.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, speaking in his nightly video address, said the shooting happened in the leafy Holosiivskyi district, injuring 14 people, including a 12-year-old boy.
“He took hostages and unfortunately, one of them was killed,” Zelenskiy said. “Four people died simply on the street. One woman died in hospital after being seriously wounded.”
Shootings of this nature are extremely rare in Ukraine.
Video from the scene showed emergency crews loading at least one body into an ambulance.
Unofficial Telegram channels quoted witnesses as saying the suspect had moved down a street and shot and killed people at point-blank range without warning before entering the supermarket.
“The shooter in Kyiv was liquidated during the arrest,” Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on Telegram.
“Special forces of the … national police stormed the store where the attacker was. He took people hostage and shot at a policeman during his detention. Before that, negotiators tried to contact him.”
Klymenko told reporters at the scene that officers had tried without success to negotiate with the suspect for 40 minutes. He said the man had owned a registered weapon and secured a medical certificate to use it.
Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko said the shooter had been identified as a 58-year-old native of Moscow.
Zelenskiy said the suspect had a criminal record and had set fire to the apartment where he was registered before going into the street with the gun.
The president said he had lived for some time in the eastern Donetsk region, one of the focal points of the four-year war with Russia.
Kravchenko said the suspect had brandished an automatic weapon.
He posted a photo showing a blurred prone figure covered in blood inside a store, a weapon lying nearby.
(Reporting by Valentyn Ogirenko in Kyiv, Ron Popeski, Editing by Louise Heavens, Chizu Nomiyama, Rod Nickel)
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