With morgues overflowing and many bodies lying in the streets, municipal officials in besieged Mariupol, Ukraine, are burying the dead in a mass grave amid Russian bombardment.
With no time to pay tribute, officials hastily crucify the dead before pushing them into a 25-meter-long trench opened in a cemetery in the city center, the Associated Press reports.
Many bodies are carried to the cemetery wrapped in carpets or plastic bags. Forty arrived Tuesday and another 30 on Wednesday - some were soldiers, others civilians killed by Russian fire or died of natural causes amid the war.
No relatives are present for the hasty funerals.
Mortar shells fell on the cemetery Tuesday, leading to a temporary halt to the gruesome operations. City authorities hope to close the mass grave on Thursday if the shelling stops for some time.
At the cemetery gates, a woman asks if her mother ended up in the trench. She had left her body outside a city morgue three days earlier, with a paper label bearing her name.
The official answers in the affirmative to the woman, who preferred not to be named.
On Thursday afternoon, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced Russia's bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, which resulted in several people being crushed.
The victims of the attack are likely to end up in the same trench.
Source: in.gr
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