Hundreds of Soviet regime victims reburied in Ukraine

Soldiers carry coffins during a reburial ceremony in Lviv on February 3, 2016

The remains of more than five hundred apparent victims of the Soviet regime were reburied on Wednesday at a cemetery in Ukraine's western city of Lviv, local authorities said. The bones of 511 people -- 67 of them children -- were found in two separate locations by construction workers and residents in 2014-2015. Local historians believe they all were prisoners of Stalin's notorious NKVD secret police unit, a precursor to the late Soviet-era KGB, executed by the Soviets at the end of World War II. The prisoners' nationalities and the crimes for which they charged remain unknown. AFP reporters on the scene saw the rows of closed wooden coffins on the ground before they were interred with the military honours at the city's central cemetery. "The war ends when the last person is buried," Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi said before the ceremony.