Shooter in Holosiivskyi district records his actions on voice recorder, says Klymenko
The shooting in Kyiv’s Holosiivskyi district began as a result of a domestic dispute; the shooter recorded his actions on a voice recorder.
According to Ukrinform, this was reported by Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko during a meeting with media representatives.
“It all started with a domestic dispute. The shooter lived on the fifth floor. He had conflicts with a neighbor on the sixth floor. As it turns out, this conflict had been going on for some time. And on this day [April 18], there was another conflict between them. When the shooter’s phone was seized, after he had been neutralized, they saw that he had been recording everything on a voice recorder,” the minister said.
According to him, this allowed law enforcement to piece together what happened minute by minute.
“He was constantly muttering something. ...It’s very hard to understand what he was saying. It was a jumble of words that, in principle, couldn’t possibly make sense. For example, ‘the director, by the way, he lives in this building, such an adult’… The director—as I understand it—was a neighbor from the sixth floor who called him the director. And that annoyed him,” said Klymenko.
According to him, the suspect fired the first shots from a non-lethal weapon near the building’s entrance.
“Then he returned to the apartment, grabbed the carbine, set the apartment on fire, and went out onto the street. The whole time, he was recording audio on his phone. Why? I’ll explain. Do you recall the information that this individual, the terrorist, had allegedly been convicted under Article 125 for causing minor bodily harm? The court closed the criminal case at the time because the parties settled, and in fact, he had no criminal record. And our preliminary assessment is that he started recording on purpose,” said the Minister of Internal Affairs.
He suggested that the man might not have intended to shoot.
“He was recording this incident so that he wouldn’t later be accused in court, for example, or by the police, of having said something to someone. But he ‘snapped’—you can hear that in his own words on the recording,” Klymenko stated.
As reported, on April 18 in the Holosiivskyi district of Kyiv, a man opened fire on people. He then took hostages in a store and fired at police officers during his arrest. Negotiators attempted to make contact with the perpetrator. Ultimately, he was neutralized.
The Office of the Prosecutor General noted that the shooter was a native of Moscow.
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the suspect had a registered firearm—a carbine. While walking down the street, he shot four people; the fifth victim, who was a hostage, was shot directly inside the store.
A total of six people were reported killed and 14 wounded in the shooting. On April 20, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klychko announced that the death toll from the shooting had risen to seven.
Investigators from the Security Service of Ukraine classified the shooting of civilians and the hostage-taking in the Holosiivskyi district of Kyiv as a terrorist act.
Photo: Ministry of Internal Affairs