SLOVIANSK, May 29. /ITAR-TASS/. Stella Khorosheva, spokeswoman for the people's Mayor of Sloviansk Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, has confirmed on Thursday that representatives of the Sloviansk self-defense forces detained the OSCE observers.
"They have been detained," the spokeswoman said. "We had warned them not to go near defense positions, but they did not heed the warning, and we had to detain them," the spokeswoman confirmed.
"It was found out that some of the detained did not belong to the OSCE mission. They have been kept captive until all the circumstances are clarified," the spokeswoman said. Asked about their whereabouts, the spokeswoman merely said that "they were not in Sloviansk".
OSCE reported on May 26 that the OSCE observer mission to Ukraine had lost contact with four OSCE observers who had been working in the Donetsk region. The four observers had last contacted their colleagues at 6.00 pm local time Monday.
Besides, another group of eleven OSCE observers was detained in the Donetsk region on May 28 when the observers were on the way to Dnipropetrovsk. The observes from the second group have been released.
Incidentally, the spokeswoman for the Sloviansk people's mayor Stella Khorosheva, who confirmed that the observers had been detained, did not specify which particular group of the OSCE observers was at issue.