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Ukraine opposition leader hurt in clash with police

Ukraine’s ex-Interior Minister Yuri Lutsenko receives medical aid after being injured in a scuffle between police and anti-government activists. (Associated Press)
Sergei L. Loiko Los Angeles Times

MOSCOW – Ukraine opposition leader Yuri Lutsenko was seriously injured when protesters clashed with riot police in downtown Kiev early Saturday, his spokeswoman said.

Shortly after midnight, Lutsenko tried to intervene in a confrontation between several hundred riot police and about a thousand protesters in downtown Kiev when police suddenly used tear gas and clubs against the crowd, Larisa Sargan, Lutsenko’s press secretary, told the Los Angeles Times.

“Yuri was hit several times over the head with a club before he fell,” Sargan said in a phone interview.

The Kiev protests turned violent in November and early December after President Victor Yanukovich refrained from signing a free trade and association agreement with the European Union, but since then they have been mostly peaceful, while sometimes drawing hundreds of thousands.

But on Friday a district court in Kiev sentenced three opposition activists to six years in prison in a case that started in 2011. The three activists from the town of Vasilkovo were found guilty of possessing explosives and planning to blow up a monument to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in the nearby town of Borispol.

The opposition considers the verdicts politically motivated, arguing that the convicted activists were set up and that the alleged explosives were planted on them, Sargan said.

Friday night after the verdict, at least 200 protesters blocked the courthouse exit in an attempt to prevent police from taking the three activists to prison. Police, however, broke through the crowd and took the prisoners away in two vehicles. Protesters along the route then blocked the vehicles, surrounding them with private cars and puncturing the tires.

Several more police buses arrived, carrying at least 400 riot police with clubs and shields. Lutsenko, a former Interior minister, then arrived on the scene.

At least seven protesters were injured in the clash, the UNIAN news organization reported. It said two opposition lawmakers were among those beaten by police. No arrests were reported.

Lutsenko is being treated in a Kiev clinic’s intensive therapy ward. “The doctors who have just stitched his over-1-inch head wound suspect a serious brain concussion,” Sargan said.

After the clashes Saturday morning and the beating of Lutsenko and other activists, the opposition called for a major rally today in Independence Square.