How the search for evidence works : The puzzle of Butscha - on the trail of a war crime

daily mirror How the search for evidence works : The puzzle of Butscha - on the trail of a war crime Georg Ismar - 1 hour ago Satellite images, finds of ammunition, autopsies, survivor reports: Specialists are trying to collect evidence for the prosecution. How do you proceed? It's a puzzle designed to refute Russian accounts of misinformation. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov calls the hundreds of civilians killed in Bucha a "staging by Ukraine to harm Russia." As early as the First World War, it was said: “In war, truth is the first victim.” But how can the question of guilt be reconstructed in a way that will stand up in court? The evaluation of satellite images offers an important starting point in the 21st century. According to this, many bodies were there long before the Russian troops left. The high-resolution images "confirm recent videos and photos on social media showing bodies that have been lying on the street for weeks," said a spokesman for US satellite imaging company Maxar Technologies. The New York Times compared the satellite images with various images taken by Ukrainian officials and international media and confirmed that some of the bodies had been in the position shown for three weeks before the Russian withdrawal, before being found by Ukrainian soldiers after the evacuation a few days ago recapture were discovered. "The bodies were there, the Ukrainians didn't put them there for the press," Wenzel Michalski, director of Human Rights Watch Germany, is certain. "Everything indicates that the victims were deliberately targeted and killed directly," says the spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. However, international humanitarian law prohibits intentional attacks on civilians in armed conflicts - that would be tantamount to a war crime UN experts are supposed to travel here. In the search for the perpetrators, the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" also reports important clues with reference to Ukrainian sources: According to this, packing slips in ammunition boxes would indicate that a unit of the Russian military was also deployed in Butscha, which had presumably already existed during the annexation Crimea was there. The packing slips found at an abandoned Russian base in Bucha indicated military unit 74268. Behind it is the 234th Russian Guards Parachute Regiment. It belongs to a division from Pskov in northwestern Russia.