Ukrainian border guards say they have detained a Russian father and his Ukrainian son for attempting to transport a dead woman’s body across the Russian-Ukrainian border in a car.
Oleh Slobodyan, the spokesman for Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service said in a Facebook post Tuesday that the woman’s body was discovered by border guards during a car inspection at the Hoptivka checkpoint in Kharkiv Oblast. After officials found the body, the man reportedly proceeded to explain that the woman was his wife and showed the border guards her death certificate dated Oct. 22.
“When inspecting the vehicle, law enforcement officers found the corpse of a woman who was in the backseat, wearing a seatbelt as if she were a living person,” Slobodyan wrote.
The man claimed he had been trying to transfer the body to Ukraine in order to bury his wife in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region, where the family used to live, Slobodyan told the Kyiv Post newspaper.
“The Russian border guards apparently didn’t see anything unusual in a dead body passing through their checkpoint,” he added.
According to the newspaper, Ukrainian police have opened a criminal case into homicide in their investigation of the incident.
