Dozens feared dead in bombing of village school
ZAPORIZHZHIA — As many as 60 people may have been killed when a bomb struck a village school in eastern Ukraine, the regional governor said on Sunday.
Luhansk region Gov. Serhiy Gaidai said about 90 people had been sheltering in the school in Bilohorivka, which was hit on Saturday by a Russian bomb, setting it ablaze.
“Thirty people were evacuated from the rubble, seven of whom were injured. Sixty people were likely to have died,” Gaidai wrote on the Telegram messaging app, adding that two bodies had been found.
But some civilians evacuated from the school put the number lower, saying there had been 37 people sheltering there. “There are only 12 of us left alive,” said one of four patients interviewed by Washington Post reporters as they left a hospital in the town of Bakhmut.
“We'd been inside that basement for a month,” said a 57-year-old woman who gave her name as Irena. “We were eating dinner when it happened. We didn't know what hit us.”
Video footage from what remained of the school showed firefighters digging through the debris as flames licked the rubble.
There was no response from Moscow to the report.