Ukraine region chief accuses police of inaction in shooting incident at local resort

KIEV, January 11. /TASS/. The head of Ukrainian Transcarpathia region’s administration has accused local law enforcement agencies of inaction in the shooting incident at a local holiday centre in the early hours of Monday.

Gennady Moskal said the incident, in which five drunken members of the Right Sector extremist group broke into the holiday center beating restaurant personnel, undermined the tourism image of the region.

"This outrageous incident has done huge damage to the image of Transcarpathia, and local media in Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are already covering it," he wrote on his website.

French tourists holidaying at the Dom Magnata holiday centre at the Dragobrat ski resort immediately left it, he went on. "They will hardly want to go to Transcarpathia for a holiday once again and will be advising their acquaintances against it," he said.

He said activists of the Right Sector, the organization outlawed in Russia as extremist, "are for the second time staging an outrageous provocation in Transcarpathia with the use of firearms".

Meanwhile, the region is hardly making both ends meet, he noted. "Hundreds of thousands of Transcarpathia residents have to seek seasonal labor outside Ukraine," he wrote.

The region is pinning big hopes on the tourism season. "However, in summer, the Right Sector disrupted the tourism season by shelling in Mukachevo, in which some people were killed, wounded or injured," he wrote.

In the recent development, five drunken members of the extremist group broke into the resort center at about 4 am, demanding that a cook and a barman make them something to eat, although there was no light at the center at the moment.

Then they proceeded to ‘accounts settling’ with the personnel, beating a cook and a barman, who were hospitalized with numerous injuries. Intoxicated men used pistols, which they had without possession license, Moskal wrote.

Local personnel and tourists managed to detain the five before police arrived at the site, he said, once again accusing law enforcement agencies of inaction.

In developments of July 11, in the city of Mukachevo (western Transcarpathia), some 20 militants of the Right Sector opened fire from small arms during a conflict with their opponents with whom they discussed "distribution of influence areas".

The extremists then opened fire from assault rifles, heavy machineguns and grenade launchers at police officers who arrived at the site, destroyed several police vehicles, as well as set on fire a traffic police checkpoint and a filling station.

According to prosecutors of the Transcarpathian region, 4 people were killed and another 10 were wounded in the Mukachevo shooting. The prosecutors classified the incident as a terrorist attack.