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| - Kiev on Monday said its own investigation had exonerated a Ukrainian soldier jailed by Italy for the murder of a photographer and his translator during the war in eastern Ukraine. In July 2019, an Italian court sentenced Ukrainian former national guard commander Vitaliy Markiv to 24 years in prison for the killing of Italian photographer Andrea Rocchelli and his Russian assistant Andrei Mironov. Markiv is appealing his sentence and a hearing is due in Italy next month. The pair were killed in May, 2014, after being hit by shrapnel from mortar shells during a fierce firefight between government forces and Russian-backed separatists in the rebel-held east. Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said Monday that "Markiv was deprived of the right to defend himself. "Italian law enforcement officers never came to Ukraine (during the investigation)," he told reporters. "Any unbiased expert would have seen at the scene that it was impossible" for Markiv to have killed Rocchelli and Mironov, he added. Markiv, who also has Italian citizenship, was arrested in June 2017 after arriving on a flight from Ukraine and has since been held in several prisons in Italy. Avakov said that Ukrainian investigators had questioned witnesses and conducted tests that proved Markiv was not responsible. During the exchange of fire Markiv was armed only with an automatic rifle and positioned too far from the place where the men were killed, he said. "We ask the Italian court to look at this with an open mind," Avakov said, referring to the court of appeal hearings in the case, which begin on September 29 in Milan. Rocchelli, 30, was the founder of the Cesura photo agency and a contributor to leading media organisations such as US magazine Newsweek and the French daily Le Monde. More than 13,000 people have been killed in the conflict in eastern Ukraine that erupted in 2014 after a popular uprising ousted a pro-Kremlin president and Russia responded by annexing Crimea. dg/am/jj
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