Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Karim Khan visited Bucha, the town in the Kyiv region.
"ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan visited Bucha. It is right that a group of forensic experts from the International Criminal Court will start working in the city. The russian military will inevitably be held responsible for war crimes. We will drag them all to the Tribunal. And not just for what happened in Bucha," - he told in the evening video address.
The Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine informed the details of the visit and published a photo.
"Karim A.A. Khan, the royal lawyer, arrived in Kyiv with a team of investigators and experts to begin his independent investigation directly at the war crimes scene," - said Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova.
She said that on the day of Khan's arrival in Bucha, the people began exhumating the bodies of killed civilians from the second mass grave on the territory of the local church. Together, they also visited the storage place for cars destroyed by the russian military.
In the second mass grave, as in the previous one, most of the victims who have already been examined have gunshots and shrapnel wounds.
"The horrible evidence of the atrocities of the russian army in Ukraine are everywhere, and we are joining forces with the ICC Prosecutor's Office to investigate every war crime on our land," - Venediktova added.
According to Venedictova, the ICC Prosecutor's Office will soon work together with a joint investigation team set up by Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland.
"It is essential that the ICC Prosecutor Khan sees the consequences and evidence of these horrific crimes of the russian federation with his own eyes and is sincere in his desire to work tirelessly for the rule of law and justice for those killed and wounded," - she said.
The ICC press service submitted a statement by Karim Khan in Bucha on Twitter.
"Ukraine is a place of crime. We are here (in Bucha - ed.) because we have reasonable grounds to believe that crimes within the jurisdiction of the ICC are being committed. We have to pierce the fog of war to get to the truth," - says the statement.
Earlier, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, addressed the missions of the International Criminal Court and international organizations to arrive in Bucha and other cities and towns of the Kyiv region as soon as possible to gather evidence of russians committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
After the suburbs of Kyiv were liberated from the russians, it became known about the atrocities of the occupiers. The Bucha City Mayor reported that 280 people were buried in a mass grave. All of them were civilians. Also, people keep finding bodies of tortured and killed civilians on the streets of the city liberated from the occupiers. Some of them were not even 16 years old. Russians shot all these people, shot in the back of the head. However, there were strips of white fabric on the bodies; it indicates those people were civilians.
A the end of February, the Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan initiated an investigation into russia's crimes against Ukraine. He describes the actions of the russian military as "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity." The Prosecutor noted that Ukraine is not a member state of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC or "Court"), so it cannot transfer the situation to its office.
As of 25 March 2022, 41 countries have already appealed to the ICC to support Ukraine. The Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Iryna Venediktova, has appointed Howard Morrison, a judge of the Hague Tribunal for ten years, as her adviser. He will advise the Ukrainian Prosecutor's Office on russian federation war crimes.