KHARKIV, Ukraine (Reuters) – A 13-year-old boy was killed by a Russian missile strike as he waited for a bus near a mosque in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Wednesday, local officials said.
After the attack, the teenager’s father knelt holding the hand of his dead son, whose covered body lay on the street near the destroyed bus shelter, a Reuters photograph showed.
Rescue workers carried away another corpse on a stretcher. The nearby mosque had been badly damaged.
Oleh Synehubov, the governor of the Kharkiv region, said three people had been killed in Kharkiv on Wednesday – the teenager, a man and a woman – but it was not clear whether all three died at the bus stop.
He said the dead teenager’s 15-year-old sister had also been wounded but did not give their names.
“This is another terrible act of terror by the Russians,” Synegubov wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
Russia, which invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, did not immediately comment on the incident. It has denied deliberately targeting civilians although Russian missile and rocket attacks have devastated Ukrainian cities and towns.
In a separate Telegram post, the local prosecutor’s office said it believed the rockets were fired from an Uragan multiple rocket launcher.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city, resisted a Russian assault that reached its outskirts in the first two months of the invasion, but has experienced almost daily shelling over the past month after a period of relative calm.
(Writing by Max Hunder, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
