Destroyed building of the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater in Mariupol. Archival photoDONETSK, July 19The investigation concluded that the explosion at the Drama Theater in Mariupol in March of this year occurred inside the building, and the allegations of a Russian airstrike are fake, the head of the investigative department of the Prosecutor General's Office told RIA Novosti DPR Aleksey Kutsurubenko. Earlier, Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs of the LPR Vitaly Kiselev said that Ukrainian militants could blow up the drama theater building from the inside.
"Materials of the criminal case, interrogations of eyewitnesses, examinations already carried out, studies indicate that the explosion in the building of the drama theater took place inside. During the analysis of the rubble in the building of the drama theater, not a single damaging element, not a single part or element of an air bomb, or any other ammunition was found,» Kutsurubenko said.
The head of the department called the allegations of the Kyiv regime and Europe that Russia launched an airstrike on the theater a lie and a fake. «We conclude that, most likely, there was an explosion inside the building of some non-enveloped explosive device,» he said. — the boxes. «We assume that, perhaps, it was these boxes that detonated,» the head of the department added. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the drama theater in Mariupol was blown up by Azov nationalists (against whose fighters a criminal case was initiated in Russia) on March 16. In Kyiv, they said that Russia launched an airstrike on a building where civilians could be. The department replied that such a statement was not true, since Russian aviation did not carry out strikes against ground targets. What happened there was called a «new bloody provocation» of the National Battalion.