A Ukrainian “traitor” and “torturer” who was appointed head of a brutal jail in Russian-occupied Kherson region has died in a car bombing.
Serhiy Moskalenko, 44, was head of a security company before the war and defected to the Russians after Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
His body was “torn in half” in the explosion. His wife and daughter were wounded, said reports.
Moskalenko was appointed head of a bleak detention centre “where inhuman tortures were committed against captured Ukrainians”, said Kyiv’s military intelligence, which said he had been “eliminated”.
A video showed his burning VAZ-2121 car in the village of Yuvileine following an explosion.
The Russian Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case and is seeking the "unidentified person" who planted an explosive device on the car.
A Ukrainian sabotage team operating in the annexed territory is suspected.
In September last year, the Kherson Regional Prosecutor's Office had accused Moskalenko of collaboration and the "voluntary occupation of a position in an illegal law enforcement agency established in the temporarily occupied territory”.
In reports of his death he was accused of “setting up a torture chamber” in the detention centre.
A Nova Kakhovka resident held there told Ukrainian investigative journalists: “Those detained there were beaten and tortured with electric shocks.
“And every night, the Russian military and local collaborators took prisoners to the basement, put them facing the wall and shot them with a pistol.
“They tried to shoot over their heads or near their ears.
“They did this to me.
“After these shots, I had a strong tinnitus, I could hardly hear anything.
“They really shot some of the prisoners.
“Sergey Moskalenko was responsible for these tortures.”
The explosion was on 17 March but the identity of the victim has only been revealed now.
Last month, chilling images emerged purporting to show the inside of one of the torture chambers.
The pictures show a chair in the middle of a blackened room and another strewn with debris, allegedly providing a glimpse of the horrors Vladimir Putin's soldiers have been subjecting prisoners to.
The city of Kherson, in the south of the country, suffered around 8,000 alleged war crimes alone before it was reclaimed by Ukrainian troops in November.
The reclamation resulted in the grim discovery of a chamber dubbed 'The Hole', Mail Online reports, where prisoners were allegedly beaten and tortured.
