BBC Online :
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has condemned indiscriminate shelling in east Ukraine after a Red Cross employee was killed.
Swiss citizen Laurent DuPasquier, 38, was killed when a shell landed near ICRC offices in the rebel-held city of Donetsk on Thursday.
He was one of several casualties in the city, ICRC director of operations Dominik Stillhart said in a statement.
The rebels and the government blamed each other for the shelling.
A rebel push began this week to eject troops holed up at the city’s heavily damaged airport.
The two sides have accused each other of violations since a ceasefire was called in the region on 5 September.
More than 3,500 people have been killed in the east Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk since the conflict erupted between pro-Russian separatists and the new Kiev government in April.
Mortar shells landed in central Donetsk early on Friday, the BBC’s Dina Newman reports from a hotel in the city centre. DuPasquier, who worked as an administrator at the ICRC offices, had been in Ukraine six weeks when he was killed.
Other ICRC staff, including about 20 Ukrainian and international employees based in Donetsk, were “in safety” following the attack, Stillhart said in the statement on Thursday. “Indiscriminate shelling of residential areas is unacceptable and violates international humanitarian law,” he said.
The office is located in a three-storey building less than 1km from the state security headquarters, which has been occupied by the separatists along with other strategic points in the city since April.
It appears DuPasquier was killed by the blast in the street.
ICRC spokesman Ewan Watson told Reuters news agency: “We’re deeply distressed by this loss.”
According to AFP news agency, rockets also slammed into a 14-storey central shopping centre shortly before 18:00 (15:00 GMT) on Thursday.
The city was long under siege by government troops but recent rebel successes loosened their encirclement.
On Wednesday, four people were killed by a shell which landed on a school in Donetsk, and six died when a minibus was hit. A Ukrainian general, Volodymyr Ruban, is in central Donetsk. He told the BBC that he is part of the monitoring group checking on violations of the ceasefire.
Gen Ruban has been negotiating directly with rebel commanders and was involved in arranging prisoner exchanges.
