BROVARY, (Ukraine): Ukraine’s interior minister and a child were among at least 14 people killed on Wednesday when a helicopter crashed into a nursery and set it ablaze in a suburb of the capital Kyiv.
Dozens of other people were hurt, including a number of children, many suffering burns. The French-made Super Puma helicopter went down in the fog in Brovary on the eastern outskirts of Kyiv, plummeting into the nursery grounds.
Ukrainian state emergency services said 14 people in total had been killed. Government agencies had earlier published higher death tolls ranging up to 18.
Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi, who was on board the helicopter, was among the dead. He was the most senior Ukrainian official to die since the war began with a Russian invasion in February last year.
Residents described a frantic rescue.
“We saw wounded people, we saw children. There was a lot of fog here, everything was strewn all around. We could hear screams, we ran towards them,” Hlib, a 17-year-old local resident, told Reuters. “We took the children and passed them over the fence, away from the nursery as it was on fire.”
The entire side of the nursery building was charred. Above the entrance was a gaping hole. Nearby, debris was scattered over a muddy playground and the helicopter wreckage lay crumpled by an apartment block, rotor blades resting against the entrance.
Several dead men lay in a courtyard, wearing blue uniforms and black boots visible from under foil blankets draped over the bodies.
Vitaliy, 56, said he saw the aircraft fall quickly and crash onto the grounds of the nursery before debris was hurled further into the block of flats. “I thought it was the engine from a rocket or something like that, something very large,” he said.
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