Liked on YouTube: Protest against new virus evacuees turns violent

Protest against new virus evacuees turns violent

(20 Feb 2020) Ukraine's effort to quarantine more than 70 people evacuated from China over the new virus outbreak plunged into chaos Thursday as local residents opposing the move engaged in violent clashes with police. Buses carrying evacuees were finally able to reach the designated place of quarantine after hours of clashes. The masked evacuees, exhausted by the long journey, were peeking through bus windows as they drove slowly under a heavy police escort while protesters tried to block the road, set fires and even hurled stones at the buses. They shattered a window in one of the buses, but the evacuees appeared unhurt. Since the early morning, several hundred residents of the village of Novi Sanzhary in Ukraine's central Poltava region had cut the road to a sanitarium intended to host the evacuees, fearing they could become infected. Demonstrators put up road blocks, burned tyres and clashed with riot police who moved to clear access. More than 10 people were detained, and Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov personally visited the site of the protests to try to calm the crowd down. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy weighed in, saying the protests showed "not the best side of our character." He tried to reassure people that the quarantined evacuees wouldn't pose any danger to local residents. In a statement published on his Facebook page, Zelenskiy said the people evacuated from China are healthy and will live in a closed medical centre run by the National Guard in the village as a precaution. "In the next two weeks it will probably be the most guarded facility in the country," Zelenskiy said. But municipal legislators in the village vowed to continue opposing the evacuation, saying that the sanitarium's sewage system is linked to the one in the village and ends up in a nearby wastewater facility. Serhiy Hordyenko, one villager at the protest, said: "Our sanatorium is not adjusted to isolate them here. We don't want to become an isolation zone, an exclusion zone, we are going to live here and we don't want there to be a new Wuhan here." In the early hours of Thursday, a plane with 45 Ukrainians and 27 foreign nationals took off from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak that has infected more than 75-thousand people worldwide and killed over 2,100. Those evacuated included people from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Panama and other countries. Find out more about AP Archive: https://ift.tt/1CUvJt1 Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP_Archive Facebook: https://ift.tt/2mlr9BZ Google+: https://plus.google.com/b/102011028589719587178/+APArchive​ Tumblr: https://aparchives.tumblr.com/​​ Instagram: https://ift.tt/2G5Qog8 You can license this story through AP Archive: https://ift.tt/2I0pn12
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