Father sets off grenades at murder trial

AT LEAST two people have died in Ukraine after a father set off two grenades at the trial of the men accused of murdering his son.

The father was killed instantly, and one of the defendants, a man born in 1977, later died of his injuries.

Nine other people, including two defendants, two bailiffs, employees of the court and prosecutor’s office and members of the public, were injured by shrapnel, police said.

The attack occurred at a hearing yesterday morning in the city of Nikopol in the Dnipropetrovsk region. The man reportedly set off the grenades after the judge recessed the hearing because a lawyer was absent.

The attacker’s son died in a car shooting in Nikopol last year, a police spokesman told the news website Ukrayinska Pravda. Local media reported that three men had blocked his car with their vehicles and shot at it with an assault rifle, killing his son and another man.

Liga.net a news website, reported the son was Rizvan Tapayev and his father was Ruslan Tapayev, from Russia’s Chechnya region, who had spent much of his life in Ukraine.

The court does not have a metal detector, but a guard at the entrance checked the man for weapons and didn’t find anything, police said.

Valentina Simonenko, the head of Ukraine’s council of judges, said that the incident was the “logical result” of the government’s failure to address complaints about inadequate security in courts.