Amid heavy shelling, Ukraine’s Mariupol city uses mass grave

By EVGENIY MALOLETKA
Associated Press

MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — With bodies piling up in Russia’s nine-day siege of Mariupol, the port city of 430,000 in southeastern Ukraine, local authorities are hurrying to bury the dead in a mass grave. City workers made quick signs of the cross gestures as they pushed bodies wrapped in carpets or bags into a deep trench some 25 meters (80 feet) long on the outskirts of the city. More than 70 bodies have been interred in the common grave since it was opened Tuesday. An AP journalist who visited the cemetery estimated that about half of those buried were killed in the intense shelling of the city. Others died at home from natural causes, but authorities were unable to arrange individual burials.