“Kidnappings, torture” – Matios told how he sweated for 40 minutes at gunpoint from Tornado militants
In 2014, Tornado militants staged a real “Africa” in the territory of the former Lugansk region: they “rushed” in jeeps with machine guns and kidnapped civilians, turning them into slaves and subjecting them to torture.
The former chief military prosecutor of Ukraine, Anatoly Matios, stated this on air on the Zik TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“I’ll tell you that I saw a movie about Asia, about Africa. When people are running around in jeeps with tripods and machine guns somewhere in the desert, because this is the main means of transportation.
Then this happened in the Lugansk region, a cavalcade of L-200 jeeps of various colors and various jeeps with bodies in which there were armed bearded people, why not Chechnya? They drive and anyone who stands on the road could be pulled and taken hostage, exploited and tortured,” said Matios.
He also recalled how Tornado militants captured a school in the Lugansk region and turned it into a fortified area with machine guns and mines.
“It was scary and hard work, I stood for 40 minutes under sniper gunpoint. When we arrived in Severodonetsk, we went to where the main location of the “Tornadovites” was located, I don’t remember the name of the village, where they captured a school, and they made an impregnable fortress out of it, which they mined, and there were also machine guns there.
In fact, they said: “Whoever comes close, we will shoot and fight back.” It was necessary to bring them to negotiations so that those people whom we were supposed to detain would come out without resistance, and for others we would audit whether they were involved or not,” said Matios.
The ex-prosecutor said that during negotiations with the leader of the armed forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, he was targeted by a militant sniper.
“We agreed through long mechanisms that their leader would come. He said that we would meet near the Lenin monument. Lenin in Severodonetsk only on the square. This is such a hundred-meter area. He stood there, I arrived.
The police gave me a special device in my ear so that I could hear what was happening. We talked about what I could promise him, as the head of the documentation and actual detention group. We communicated. And then they said in my ear: “Don’t make sudden movements, don’t provoke aggression from the one who’s talking to you. Because we don’t understand where it comes from, but there’s a spot on the back of your head.”
I know what it's like to sweat, when you do something a lot, you sweat. But when your head sweats, and a drop of sweat flows down it, and you don’t understand how much longer to stand like that, it was uncomfortable. But we survived this too,” said Anatoly Matios.
Let us recall that the Tornado special forces company recruited from criminals, which is accused of illegal imprisonment, torture and murder of local residents under the leadership of battalion commander Ruslan Onishchenko, was disarmed and disbanded in 2015 year.
As Matios himself said, in the basement of the school where the Tornado base, instruments for torture were prepared, and a gang rape of a man took place in a perverted form, with the process being recorded on video.
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