Destruction of the monument of nature “Arkose sandstones outcropping” located in Shirokivskyi district became the reason for the prosecution. The People’s Deputy Ihor Lutsenko was informed about this by the prosecutor’s office of Dnipropetrovsk region. Environmental scientists of EPL, whose request served as the basis for initiating the proceeding, noted that this is perhaps the first time that regional law enforcement and controlling bodies reacted to numerous violations in the protected areas of the Dnipropetrovsk region.
The monument of nature was created in 1974 by the decision of Dnipropetrovsk Regional Council No. 687.
In the spring of 2017, the monument was damaged by unknown persons. The violations were found by local ethnographers-wikipedists during the inspection of the object of the nature reserve fund. The monument was severely damaged by the illegal mining of stone. Particularly, the cliff was partially damaged, cliff spills were extracted and removed, trees and shrubs at the bottom of the cliff were destroyed. The tracks of trucks and excavator indicate to the fact that mining was carried out with the help of heavy machinery. Similar traces of extraction were noticed on other outcropping of sandstones in Shirokivskyi district (near the village of Rudnichne), which indicates to the systematic nature of such illegal activity.
On May 13, 2017, the Prosecutor’s Office of the Dnipropetrovsk region included the relevant information to the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations and initiated a pre-trial investigation in the criminal proceedings No. 4201740000000543 under Part 1 of Article 252 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine on the fact of damaging by unidentified persons of the object of the natural reserve fund – natural monuments “Arkose sandstones outcropping”.
The pre-trial investigation was entrusted to the investigating department of the Shirokiv police department of the Kryvy Rih police department of the Main Directorate of the National Police in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Procedural guidance is provided by the Kryvyi Rih Prosecutor’s Office No. 1.
The progress in this matter will be reported later.
More about the monument:
https://uk.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1757565
Photo from Wiki storage:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bila_skelya?uselang=uk
Contacts:
Oksana Hryshan, volunteer
Oleksiy Vasyliuk, EPL environmental scientist
office@epl.org.ua, (032) 225 76 82
