A former leading Ukrainian official has been shot dead outside an American school in the Spanish capital Madrid, reports say.
The
51-year-old man, named by Ukrainian and Spanish sources as Andriy
Portnov, had just dropped his children off at the school in the Pozuelo
de Alarcón area of the city, reports say.
At
least one unidentified attacker fired several shots at the victim
before fleeing into a wooded area in a nearby public park, Spanish
reports said.
He had previously been an MP in Yulia Tymoshenko's governing party.
He left Ukraine after the revolution only to return in 2019 after Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president.
He
then left Ukraine again, and in 2021 was sanctioned by the US Treasury,
which said he had been "widely known as a court fixer" who had taken
steps to control the judiciary and undermine reform efforts.
The European Union had earlier imposed sanctions on Portnov, but he challenged the move in court and won the case.
It
was not clear who was behind the shooting that took place at about
09:15 local time (07:15 GMT) on Wednesday, reportedly as children were
still entering the school.
Police
drones and a helicopter searched the area for a gunman who, according to
witnesses, was a thin man in a blue tracksuit. Spanish reports
suggested the gunman may have had at least one accomplice riding on a
motorbike.
A similar gun attack took
place in 2018, when a Colombian drug trafficker was fatally shot outside
a British Council school a few kilometres away.
But
the motive behind Wednesday's attack is not yet known. Emergency
services at the scene could only confirm that that Portnov had suffered
several bullet wounds in the back and the head.
Portnov's black Mercedes car was cordoned off and the school wrote to parents to confirm that all the students inside were safe.
Although
Ukraine's intelligence services have been linked to several killings in
Russia and occupied areas of Ukraine, a fatal attack in Spain in
February last year was linked to Russian hitmen.
The victim, a Russian helicopter pilot, was shot dead near Alicante, months after defecting to Ukraine.
Authorities
in Kyiv said they had offered to protect Maxim Kuzminov in Ukraine, but
he is believed to have moved to Spain's south-east coast under a false
identity.
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