A man formerly convicted for armed robbery has been holding about two dozen people hostage on a bus for hours in north-west Ukraine.
The hostage drama in the city of Lutsk began on Tuesday morning when emergency services received a call from a man who said he had hijacked a bus and taken about 20 people hostage.
Police said that the hostage-taker has weapons and explosives on him.
Anton Herashenko, Ukraine’s deputy interior minister, identified the man as Russia-born Maxym Kryvosh who has spent around a
decade in prison, twice convicted on a variety of charges from armed robbery to illegal possession of weapons.
Police have surrounded the white-and-blue bus that was parked on a central square and stopped traffic in the city centre. An armoured vehicle was spotted nearby.
Mr Kryvosh at some point opened fire from a bus window and threw a grenade at the officers outside but the device did not go off.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president, said on Tuesday afternoon that law enforcement agents were negotiating with the man but he would not go into detail.
“We are doing our best to free the hostages,” he said.
Several hours before the bus was hijacked, a man with the nickname Maxim Plokhoy, “plokhoy” meaning “bad” in Russian, uploaded a video of himself, dressed in black and holding a rifle, saying that he stands “against the system.”
The gunman in social media posts which were blocked several hours later demanded that top Ukrainian officials publicly admit that they were “terrorists.” He also threatened to set off another bomb in a crowded place.
Yuri Kroshko, head of the regional police, told reporters that police have seen the hostage-taker’s demands but they remain “unclear” to them.
Read the latest on this story here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/21/man-takes-20-people-hostage-bus-north-western-ukraine/?WT.mc_id=tmg_youtube_offsite_televideo-youtubevideo_July21Ukraine&utm_source=tmgoff&utm_medium=tmg_youtube&utm_content=offsite_televideo&utm_campaign=tmg_youtube_offsite_televideo-youtubevideo_July21Ukraine
Get the latest headlines: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Telegraph.co.uk and YouTube.com/TelegraphTV are websites of The Telegraph, the UK’s best-selling quality daily newspaper providing news and analysis on UK and world events, business, sport, lifestyle and culture.
