KIEV, May 24. /TASS/. Several hundred activists of anti-Maidan movement gathered on Sunday in the centre of the Ukrainian Black Sea port city of Odessa to launch a signature collecting campaign to set up a memorial to the victims of the Odessa massacre on May 2, 2014, local media reported.
""Activists had planned to gather in front of the House of Trade Unions to restore the memorial destroyed two weeks ago. But, like a week ago, they were not let do this: access to the square was prohibited due to police drills," the Timer publication said.
As a result, the rally was held in the vicinity of the square.
"It is our duty to perpetuate the memory of people killed in that tragedy. Odessa will never forget and will never forgive what was done to our activists on May 2," Moris Ibragim, a leader of the Kulikovo Pole anti-Maidan movement.
On May 2, 2014, activists of Right Sector [an organization recognized in Russia as extremist] and the so-called ‘Maidan self-defence’ set ablaze a tent camp planed in front of the House of Trade Union by federalization supporters who collected signatures in favour of a referendum on the federalization of Ukraine and granting the Russian language an official state language status. Federalization supporters retreated to the House of Trade Unions but radicals encircled the building and set it on fire. A total of 48 people were killed and more than 200 were injured.
Twenty-two people were charged with instigating clashes. Eleven are in custody, eleven others are on the wanted list. Investigators however found no evidence of deliberate arson of the House of Trade Unions. Odessa’s Malinovsky district court on April 27 referred the indictment back to the prosecutor general’s office for further investigation, saying it lacked details and actual proof of the suspects’ guilt.