Western cover-up of Odessa massacre By Finian Cunningham

Apparently, the victims died from the blaze or from smoke inhalation, or when they jumped from windows to the pavement below.

But in the aftermath, new shocking images have been published in various reputable Russian media sources that tell a far more harrowing story.

Suspiciously, in many of the images the surrounding space where the bodies lay bears no evidence of fire damage.

Other victims also appeared to have gunshot wounds to their charred heads. And in one particularly disturbing image, the body of a pregnant woman is photographed bent over backwards on an office desk. The victim appears to have been garrotted; neither her body nor theoffice where her remains were found shows any signs of fire damage.

Russian media report survivor accounts saying that the rooms they were hiding in to escape from the effects of the blaze were broken into by assailants who pretended to be pro-Russian protesters. On entering the offices, those inside were attacked by the intruders.

When news of the deadly blaze emerged last Friday, it struck some observers as strange that so many people could have perished from a fire that was mainly located at the front of the building on the ground floor. The giant multi-storey solid stone structure surely would have given those trapped inside more escape routes or spaces to avoid the effects of deadly fumes.

And how do we explain the macabre images of partially incinerated bodies surrounded by seemingly undamaged wooden floors and railings? Or the victims with apparent gunshot wounds to the head and the pregnant woman slumped on the office table?

Another vile image shows a woman's body near an elevator door in which her naked lower body is charred, but her upper body is clothed, indicating that she may have been raped by her attackers before they killed her.

The harrowing images suggest that something much more sinister happened than what initial reports conveyed. The initial reports are disturbing enough.

In broad daylight, a peaceful protest encampment of pro-Russian citizens calling for a referendum for federalization, in opposition to the Western-backed unelected junta that seized power in Kiev on February 22, was attacked by neo-Nazi supporters of the junta. The Kiev supporters were bussed into the southern port city of Odessa from the capital and another city, Kharkov, under the guise of attending a football match.

Like many towns and cities elsewhere in the east of Ukraine, the pro-Russian protesters in Odessa are opposed to the junta in Kiev, which illegally seized power against the elected president Victor Yanukovych.

The melee turned apparently into a riot between clashing sides in Odessa. There are reports that the neo-Nazi crowd deployed agent provocateurs who used firearms while mingling among the riot police. The police reportedly did little to restrain the violence. All those arrested at the scene later were pro-Russian citizens.

Crowds from the pro-Russian side took shelter in the nearby Trade Union building. Then the neo-Nazis set the building alight with petrol bombs. As the flames flared there were shouts of "burn them" from the baying mob outside, referring to the people trapped inside.

But could such a blaze located on the ground floor entrance of the building result in such a large number of deaths, where bodies were later recovered scattered in various parts of the building?

Why the killers would do this is not clear. Pure hatred? We know that the fascist supporters of the Kiev junta are motivated by a deep hatred of the ethnic Russian population - a hatred that goes back to their forbears and ideological "heroes" of the Second World War who collaborated with the Nazi SS in extermination of fellow Ukrainians simply because they were viewed as "Untermenschen slavs".

The same hatred is expressed openly by today's political leaders in Kiev. Only a few weeks ago, demagogue Yulia Tymoshenko was caught joking in a private phone call about "whacking" ethnic Russians in the head and "nuking" pro-Russian eastern Ukraine.

But one thing seems clear. The marauding neo-Nazis who carried out the massacre in Odessa last Friday must have been given orders from certain people in power. The subsequent lack of serious criminal investigation and the dissembling media spin point to a cover-up.

Another thing that is clear is that the Western media are assisting in the cover-up of the massacre. Never mind the full horror of what may have really happened, the Western media have not even reported the apparent blaze killings with any of the seriousness that they deserve.

Incredibly, the incident was only given brief coverage, quickly dropped from the news cycle, and most reports tended to obscure the circumstances, blaming "clashes on both sides that resulted in a deadly fire" without apportioning blame on the obvious neo-Nazi perpetrators.

Tellingly, the Western media have sought to downplay the role of the neo-Nazi paramilitaries and the Western-backed junta in Kiev. One can imagine how the Western media would have given days of saturation coverage to the killings if they had been carried out by pro-Russian
protesters against supporters of the Kiev regime that the media has lionized as the "government of Ukraine".

This is reminiscent of the way the Western media distorted the sniper killings of up to 100 protesters in Kiev's Maidan Square on February 20 by blaming that incident on the then government security forces, when in reality the fatal shootings were carried out by the Western-backed coup plotters and their CIA-backed neo-Nazi paramilitaries.

Western regime change in Ukraine has led to a junta that is ruling by a reign of terror against its own citizens, where the vilest crimes are being committed to crush any political opposition. And the Western media are assiduously covering up for this criminality.

Washington has emerged as the main sponsor of the Kiev regime. Sickeningly, within hours of the Odessa massacre, US President Barack Obama was entertaining more than 2,000 sycophantic journalists at the annual White House Press Corps dinner, at which he cracked flippant jokes about Russian President Vladimir Putin being a despot.

Ironically, in this week that commemorates the defeat of murderous fascism in Europe at the end of the Second World War, the Western governments and their media are doing their best to rekindle the horror of this very same fascism in Ukraine - while blaming it on Russia, the country that really won that war.

FC/NN

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is now located in East Africa as a freelance journalist, where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring, based on eyewitness experience working in the Persian Gulf as an editor of a business magazine and subsequently as a freelance news correspondent. The author was deported from Bahrain in June 2011 because of his critical journalism in which he highlighted systematic human rights violations by regime forces. He is now a columnist on international politics for Press TV and the Strategic Culture Foundation.More articles by Finian Cunningham