A Russian mercenary, who gained notoriety for butchering prisoners of war and civilians in the Donbas, has been killed while fighting in Ukraine, Daily Mail reported.

Vladimir Andonov, 44, a fighter for the shadowy Wagner Group, was shot by a sniper near Kharkiv during a reconnaissance mission on June 5, Russian media said.

Andonov was known to Russians as ‘Vakha’ or ‘The volunteer from Buryatia’ after the region he was from, but to Ukrainians he was known as ‘the executioner’ for the massacres he helped carry out during Russia’s first invasion of the country in 2014.

His death was confirmed by Zhambal-Zhamso Zhanaev, head of the region where Andonov was from, who spoke to a Russian newspaper.

Andonov had served in the regular Russian military from 1997 until 2005 when he moved to the city of Ulan-Ude where he studied in a teaching college, Daily Mail reported.

He dropped out of school before completing his studies and got a job in trade, before answering a call for volunteers to go to Ukraine and join the fighting in 2014.

Andonov was drafted into the Olkhon special forces company fighting in the Donbas, and took part in the Battle of Debaltseve in early 2015 — one of the last major battles of the initial war.

At the time, he appeared in a video filmed in the region which became one of the first pieces of evidence that volunteers from the Buryatia were in Ukraine.

Ukraine accused him of personally participating in the massacre of prisoners of war in the town of Logvinovo in the aftermath of the battle, and of killing civilians elsewhere in Donbas.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Borokpost staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Dhaka, June 7: The deaths of 13 fire fighters – the highest fatalities in a single fire incident – while tackling the blaze and explosions at the Sitakundu BM Container Depot, was due to the lack of proper information and also the wrong way of operating, officials said on Tuesday.

According to an official, 150 fire fighters were trained in Singapore, Malaysia and Australia on how to douse chemical fires and identifying chemicals in case of such a fire and have special equipment and chemical protection suits. Skilled fire fighters would not go so near a chemical fire, the official said.

The members of this team are stationed at the headquarters and divisional cities. As per the procedure, the fire fighters begin extinguishing the blaze if it is a normal fire. In the case of a chemical fire, the specially-trained hazmat (hazardous materials) unit would go with protective jackets.

But none of these 11 trained personnel of the hazmat unit in Agrabad, Chattogram went to Sitakunda industrial area or at Kumira Fire Station, the nearby fire station.

Twenty-two normal fire fighters were the first to respond to the fire that broke out in the depot in Chattogram and most of them never made it back.

The fire fighters who rushed to BM Container Depot in Sitakunda from two adjacent fire stations were not trained on extinguishing chemical fires. Officials, however, alleged the local fire fighters, without informing the hazmat team in Agrabad, began dousing the blaze considering it a normal fire, as they were not informed about chemical substances at the depot.

Hazmat team members only went there after seeing media reports on the explosion.

Fire Service officials told the press that they were not informed about chemicals being stored in the depot. If they had known that, they could have taken precautionary and responsive measures accordingly.

The loss and number of casualties could be lessened if such trained fire fighters, with hazmat suits, can be kept at fire stations near the factories, said the colleagues of the deceased fire fighters.

Besides, the Department of Explosives has mentioned that BM Container Depot did not have any license to store hydrogen peroxide. Local Department of Explosives Inspector Tofazzal Hossain said that special infrastructure is a must for storing such chemicals, but there was no such arrangement in the depot.

His department did not know the depot had such chemicals either – and now the depot owner has said that he himself did not know what type of chemicals were stored at his own institution.

However, rubbishing this, Fire Service’s Agrabad Branch Inspector Mahbub-e-Ilahi said: “The claim of the depot owner that he did not know which chemicals were stored at his own terminal does not make any sense. We have seen owners concealing information on previous fire incidents as well.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Borokpost staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)