Bodies discovered in an enormous mass grave in a recently-liberated Ukrainian city were violently castrated, investigators at the site revealed.
Almost all of the bodies exhumed from the grave in Izyum, in the Kharkiv region, exhibit clear signs that they were subjected to cruel forms of torture, for some including having their genitals hacked off
Ukraine's First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Yevheny Yenin, said: "We continue to find bodies with signs of violent death – there are many of them.
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"These include broken ribs and cracked skulls, men with bound hands, broken jaws, and severed genitalia."
Yenin revealed that 146 bodies were dug up from the horror mass grave on September 19 alone.
Kharkiv governor Oleg Synehubov added that two of the bodies discovered so far had belonged to children.
"Some of the dead have signs of a violent death," Synehubov wrote on the social media app, Telegram.
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"There are bodies with tied hands and traces of torture. The deceased were also found to have explosive, shrapnel and stab wounds."
A heartbreaking 450 graves have been found in Izyum and the surrounding area, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said.
It is thought that many of them belong to civilians.
This comes amid claims that Izyum police station was converted into a torture centre while it was occupied by Russian forces.
Forensic investigators sent to the station to gather evidence found a number of torture implements including electric cables they think may have been used to inflict pain on Ukrainian victims.
Kharkiv police chief Sergey Bolvinov shared images of the police station, showing the dingy walls of the supposed makeshift torture chamber.
"Investigators are conducting a review of logs with a list of detainees which were kept by the raiders, as well as instruments of torture," he wrote.
"Electric cables have already been found… Each cell where people were kept will be well-studied – DNA samples and fingerprints are taken, and a database of evidence is collected for the court.
"People were kept in dark basement cells from several weeks to months, not even always understanding what exactly the occupiers wanted from them."
Meanwhile, the Kremlin has accused Ukraine of inventing reports of the mass graves found in Kharkiv.
Speaking yesterday (Monday, September 19), Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said "these are lies, adding that Russia "will stand up for the truth in this story".
This comes amid calls by senior EU officials for a war-crime probe into the Kremlin's actions in Ukraine.
Jan Lipavsky, foreign minister of the Czech Republic – the country that currently holds the presidency of the EU – took to Twitter, saying that the mass grave could indicate that Russia had committed "unthinkable and abhorrent" war crimes.
He wrote: "We stand for the punishment of all war criminals.
"In the 21st Century such attacks against the civilian population are unthinkable and abhorrent.
"We must not overlook it. I call for the speedy establishment of a special international tribunal that will prosecute the crime of aggression."
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