A former main Ukrainian official has been shot useless exterior an American college within the Spanish capital Madrid, experiences say.
The 51-year-old man, named by Ukrainian and Spanish sources as Andriy Portnov, had simply dropped his youngsters off on the college within the Pozuelo de Alarcón space of town, experiences say.
No less than one unidentified attacker fired a number of pictures on the sufferer earlier than fleeing right into a wooded space in a close-by public park, Spanish experiences mentioned.
Portnov had been an MP and deputy head within the administration of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president ousted in 2014 after months of protests.
He had beforehand been an MP in Yulia Tymoshenko’s governing celebration.
He left Ukraine after the revolution solely to return in 2019 after Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president.
He then left Ukraine once more, and in 2021 was sanctioned by the US Treasury, which mentioned he had been “extensively referred to as a court docket fixer” who had taken steps to regulate the judiciary and undermine reform efforts.
The European Union had earlier imposed sanctions on Portnov, however he challenged the transfer in court docket and gained the case.
It was not clear who was behind the capturing that came about at about 09:15 native time (07:15 GMT) on Wednesday, reportedly as youngsters had been nonetheless coming into the college.
Police drones and a helicopter searched the realm for a gunman who, in response to witnesses, was a skinny man in a blue tracksuit. Spanish experiences steered the gunman might have had at the least one confederate using on a bike.
An identical gun assault came about in 2018, when a Colombian drug trafficker was fatally shot exterior a British Council college just a few kilometres away.
However the motive behind Wednesday’s assault is just not but recognized. Emergency providers on the scene may solely verify that that Portnov had suffered a number of bullet wounds within the again and the pinnacle.
Portnov’s black Mercedes automobile was cordoned off and the college wrote to oldsters to verify that each one the scholars inside had been secure.
Though Ukraine’s intelligence providers have been linked to a number of killings in Russia and occupied areas of Ukraine, a deadly assault in Spain in February final yr was linked to Russian hitmen.
The sufferer, a Russian helicopter pilot, was shot useless close to Alicante, months after defecting to Ukraine.
Authorities in Kyiv mentioned they’d provided to guard Maxim Kuzminov in Ukraine, however he’s believed to have moved to Spain’s south-east coast underneath a false identification.
