Skip to main content

Ukrainian ex-politician shot dead outside elite American school in Madrid

1 min Mena Today

Unidentified gunmen shot dead a former Ukrainian politician on Wednesday outside a school in a wealthy suburb of Madrid, Spain's Interior Ministry said.

Andriy Portnov then Deputy Head of Presidential Administration of Viktor Yanukovych, attends a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine October 31, 2013. Reuters

Andriy Portnov then Deputy Head of Presidential Administration of Viktor Yanukovych, attends a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine October 31, 2013. Reuters

Unidentified gunmen shot dead a former Ukrainian politician on Wednesday outside a school in a wealthy suburb of Madrid, Spain's Interior Ministry said.

Andriy Portnov, 51, was previously a senior aide to a pro-Russian former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovich, who was ousted in a 2014 popular uprising.

Police reached the scene after receiving calls at 9.15 a.m. (0715 GMT) about a man with gunshot wounds on the street outside the American School of Madrid, in the Pozuelo de Alarcon suburb west of the capital, police officials told Reuters.

"Several persons shot him in the back and the head and then fled towards a forested area," an Interior Ministry source said.

When emergency services arrived they found Portnov dead with at least three gunshot wounds, a spokesperson said.

Police had covered the body of a person wearing white running shoes lying near a black Mercedes-Benz car in a cordoned-off pavement outside the school.

Portnov left for Russia in 2014 and faced investigations in Ukraine over accusations of treason and embezzlement. He was targeted with European Union sanctions, although those and the charges were later dropped.

The U.S. Treasury Department put Portnov on its sanctions list in 2021, saying he had "cultivated extensive connections to Ukraine's judicial and law enforcement apparatus through bribery".

The American School said it believed the victim was a father of children at the school but was waiting for formal identification by the police, according to a letter sent to parents seen by Reuters.

It said police were on campus interviewing parents who witnessed the incident. A spokesperson for the school did not reply to a request for comment on the incident or the letter.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there have been several high-profile crimes related to Russia and Ukraine in Spain, which has significant expatriate communities from both countries.

In 2022 a retired Spanish civil servant sent six letter bombs to targets around Spain, including to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, the Ukrainian and U.S. embassies and government offices. Pompeyo Gonzalez Pascual was convicted and jailed for the offences last year.

In February 2024, a Russian pilot who had defected to Ukraine with his helicopter was found dead from multiple gunshot wounds in the parking garage of his apartment block near Alicante in southeastern Spain.

 

(Reporting by Inti Landauro and Emma Pinedo, additional reporting by Joan Faus; writing by Charlie Devereux; editing by Andrei Khalip, Aislinn Laing, Peter Graff and Mark Heinrich)

By Emma Pinedo and Inti Landauro

Tags

Related

Politics

Spanish PM's far-left ally wants 'reset' after corruption case

Spain's Labour Minister Yolanda Diaz, who leads the ruling coalition's far-left junior party Sumar, called for a "reset" of government on Friday after a corruption investigation forced out a close aide of the prime minister.

Politics

U.S. ambassador to Russia to leave post soon, says embassy

Lynne Tracy, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, will soon leave her post, her embassy said on Thursday, after serving through one of the most tense and difficult periods in relations between Moscow and Washington.

Politics

US-China trade deal is 'done,' Trump says

A U.S.-China trade deal is "done," U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday, hours after negotiators from Washington and Beijing agreed on a framework to get a fragile trade truce back on track and remove Chinese export restrictions on rare earth minerals and other critical industrial components.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Mena banner 4

To make this website run properly and to improve your experience, we use cookies. For more detailed information, please check our Cookie Policy.

  • Necessary cookies enable core functionality. The website cannot function properly without these cookies, and can only be disabled by changing your browser preferences.