«Killed in captivity.» Lithuanian doc filmmaker Kvedaravičius's friend says he was shot by Russian military in Mariupol

A friend of Lithuanian documentary filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius, who died in Mariupol, says he was not killed by a missile hit on his car, as previously reported, but shot by the Russian military while in captivity.

«The soulless Russian soldiers took Mantas prisoner and killed him. And then they just left his body lying there. His heroic wife did the unthinkable. She was able to find his body in Mariupol while under shelling and bring it back to her native Lithuania. To avoid being killed, to prevent the body from being destroyed, she had to conceal the information. A limited number of people knew about the death, but once the information hit the media, it was impossible to stop it,» Albina Lvutina wrote.

According to her, the documentary filmmaker did not die on April 2, as the media reported, he was killed earlier. «By the time the death was announced by the Ukrainian President's Office and by Zelensky himself, the wife with the coffin had been waiting in line several hours to exit Russia,» she says.

One of the director's recent works was the film «Mariupolis» about the front-line life in the city. The picture was released in 2016. Kvedaravičius also made the documentary film «Barzakh» in 2011 portraying Chechnya under the rule of Ramzan Kadyrov.