Your trusted source

An eighteen-year-old Ukrainian woman has died in hospital, weeks after a brutal sexual assault that prompted a campaign against political corruption, reports the BBC.

According to the U.S. news prosecutors said Oksana Makar was raped by three young men on March 9 in the southern city of Mykolaiv. The men then tried to cover up their crime by strangling her, dumping her naked body at an abandoned construction site and setting her on fire.

Makar miraculously survived and battled for her life for more than two weeks. She suffered burns over more than half of her body and severe damage to her lungs, and her right arm was amputated to stop the gangrene.
The AFP in its turn says that the victim was found by a passer-by after she was dumped by her attackers at an abandoned construction site. She was hospitalized with 55 percent burns in a critical condition, requiring the amputation of one of her arms.

Oksana Makar died of her injuries in a specialist hospital in the eastern city of Donetsk where she had been taken after her rescue, the clinic announced, the source says.

Her heart stopped beating after she suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage and she died despite three attempts to resuscitate her, the chief doctor of the Donetsk Burns centre, Emil Fistal, AFP reports.

He said the fact she was able to survive for three weeks since the attack, which occurred on March 9 or 10, according to the source, had only been possible due to intense treatment and therapy.
"Imagine. She was strangled and they (the attackers) thought she had died. So they burned her. She was lying there 10 hours in the freezing cold and inhaled the by-products of the burning," Fistal said.
President Viktor Yanukovych sent condolences to her relatives while Prime Minister Mykola Azarov vowed that the attackers would be punished "without compromise."

The crime shocked Ukraine with its cruelty. But it also caused nationwide protests against corruption after police initially released two of the suspects who had powerful connections in the region. All the three suspects were eventually arrested and charged with rape, and one with attempted murder, the News 24 informs.