KIEV, August 11. /TASS/. Ukraine’s national police force has launched a criminal investigation into the detention of Ukrainian citizen Yevgeny Panov who is suspected of attempting to carry out a terrorist attack in Crimea. Ukrainian investigators defined the incident as "unlawful deprivation of liberty or kidnapping," the National Police press service said on Thursday.

"Investigators have opened a criminal case in accordance with an inquiry from Panov’s relatives received on August 10," the press service quotes Vadim Troyan, the acting National Police head, as saying. "We are taking all necessary steps to ensure a prompt, full and impartial clarification of all the circumstances of this crime," Troyan said.

Meanwhile, Irina Gerashchenko, the first deputy speaker of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada and Kiev’s representative in the Contact Group’s humanitarian subgroup, has called Panov "another hostage who was kidnapped," adding that Ukraine will seek his release. She noted that he was seized "under far-fetched pretexts."

TASS earlier reported that Ukrainian and Russian citizens who provided assistance in plotting terrorist attacks had been detained in Crimea. According to the FSB, one of the organizers of the planned terrorist attacks was Yevgeny Panov, a resident of Ukraine’s Zaporozhye region born in 1977, an employee of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s main intelligence directorate who was detained as well and is giving a confession.

The Russian Federal Security Service said on Wednesday that it had detained a group of Ukrainian saboteurs overnight to August 7 near the city of Armyansk (Crimea) and that it had prevented terrorist attacks in Crimea prepared by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s main intelligence directorate. Their planned targets were critically important infrastructure and life support facilities. Twenty improvised explosive devices containing more than 40 kilograms of TNT equivalent, ammunition, fuses, antipersonnel and magnetic bombs, grenades and the Ukrainian armed forces’ standard special weapons were found at the scene, the FSB said.