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Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has said peace talks will continue with Russia despite accusing Moscow of war crimes and genocide, BBC reported.

Mr Zelensky was speaking in Bucha, near the capital Kyiv, where bodies of civilians were found strewn on the streets after Russian troops withdrew.

The shocking videos and photos sparked outrage around the world and calls for further sanctions against Russia.

Without evidence, Russia said images of atrocities had been staged by Ukraine.

Ukraine started a war crimes investigation after it said the bodies of 410 civilians had been found in areas around Kyiv. Some were discovered in mass graves while others had their hands tied and had apparently been shot at close range.

Wearing a bullet-proof vest and surrounded by Ukrainian soldiers, Mr Zelensky said Russian troops had "treated people worse than animals". "That is real genocide, what you have seen here," he said.

Responding to a question from the BBC on whether it was still possible to talk peace with Russia, Mr Zelensky said: "Yes, because Ukraine must have peace. We are in Europe in the 21st Century. We will continue efforts diplomatically and militarily," according to BBC.

In other developments:

• The International Red Cross said members of a team trying to organise evacuations from the besieged city of Mariupol had been detained by police in the nearby town of Manhush
• Despite pressure from EU, Germany warned that cutting off Russian gas supplies to Europe was not a possibility at the moment
• The UK was expected to push for further international sanctions against Russia as reaction to the evidence of atrocities

In the town of Bucha, witnesses described Russian soldiers firing on men fleeing after refusing to allow them to leave through humanitarian corridors.

At least 20 dead men were found lying in the street, many of them with extensive wounds. Some had been shot through the temple, as if executed, while others had clearly been run over by tanks.

Satellite images taken by Maxar show a 14m (45ft) mass grave in the city near the church of St Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints.

In the nearby village of Motyzhyn, a BBC team were taken to see a shallow grave. Four bodies were visible, and Ukrainian officials said there could be more, BBC reported.

Three of the bodies have been identified as that of the head of the village, Olha Sukhenko, her husband and her son. The fourth has not been identified yet. It is unclear when they were killed.

In Irpin, there is evidence of people being shot at as they tried to flee the commuter town. On 6 March four civilians - a woman, her teenage son, her daughter of around eight years of age, and a family friend - were all killed by mortar fire as they tried to cross a battered bridge.

In an interview with the BBC, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said the "Bucha massacre [was] a game changer" but that the "worst was yet to come". He urged Western nations to provide Ukraine with more weapons and impose more sanctions on Russia, according to BBC.

Moscow faced global revulsion and accusations of war crimes Monday after the Russian pullout from the outskirts of Kyiv revealed streets, buildings and yards strewn with corpses of what appeared to be civilians, many of them evidently killed at close range, Associated Press reported.

The grisly images of battered or burned bodies left out in the open or hastily buried led to calls for tougher sanctions against the Kremlin, especially a cutoff of fuel imports from Russia. Germany and France reacted by expelling dozens of Russian diplomats, suggesting they were spies, and US President Joe Biden said Russian leader Vladimir Putin should be tried for war crimes.

“This guy is brutal, and what’s happening in Bucha is outrageous,” Biden said, referring to the town northwest of the capital that was the scene of some of the horrors.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy left the capital, Kyiv, for his first reported trip since the war began nearly six weeks ago to see for himself what he called the “genocide” and “war crimes” in Bucha. 

In his nightly video address, Zelenskyy pledged that Ukraine would work with the European Union and the International Criminal Court to identify Russian fighters involved in any atrocities, according to the Associated Press.

“The time will come when every Russian will learn the whole truth about who among their fellow citizens killed, who gave orders, who turned a blind eye to the murders,” he said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed the scenes outside Kyiv as a “stage-managed anti-Russian provocation.” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the images contained “signs of video forgery and various fakes.”

Russia has similarly rejected previous allegations of atrocities as fabrications on Ukraine’s part.

Ukrainian officials said the bodies of at least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv that were recaptured from Russian forces in recent days.

The Ukrainian prosecutor-general’s office described one room discovered in Bucha as a “torture chamber.” In a statement, it said the bodies of five men with their hands bound were found in the basement of a children’s sanatorium where civilians were tortured and killed.

Associated Press journalists saw dozens of bodies in Bucha, including at least 13 in and around a building that local people said Russian troops used as a base. Three other bodies were found in a stairwell, and a group of six were burned together.

Many victims seen by AP appeared to have been shot at close range. Some were shot in the head. At least two had their hands tied. A bag of spilled groceries lay near one victim, Associated Press reported.

The dead witnessed by the news agency’s journalists also included bodies wrapped in black plastic, piled on one end of a mass grave in a Bucha churchyard. Many of those victims had been shot in cars or killed in explosions trying to flee the city. With the morgue full and the cemetery impossible to reach, the churchyard was the only place to keep the dead, Father Andrii Galavin said.

Tanya Nedashkivs’ka said she buried her husband in a garden outside their apartment building after he was detained by Russian troops. His body was one of those left heaped in a stairwell.

“Please, I am begging you, do something!” she said. “It’s me talking, a Ukrainian woman, a Ukrainian woman, a mother of two kids and one grandchild. For all the wives and mothers, make peace on Earth so no one ever grieves again.”

Another Bucha resident, Volodymyr Pilhutskyi, said his neighbor Pavlo Vlasenko was taken away by Russian soldiers because the military-style pants he was wearing and the uniforms that Vlasenko said belonged to his security guard son appeared suspicious. When Vlasenko’s body was later found, it had burn marks from a flamethrower, his neighbor said, according to the Associated Press.

Indian ambassador to Nepal Vinay Mohan Kwatra has been appointed as the foreign secretary of India.

The Indian Cabinet appointed Kwatra as the foreign secretary today.

He will assume office from May 1. 

Kwatra will succeed Harish Vardhan Shringla, who is retiring at the end of this month.

CPN-UML senior Vice-Chairman Ishwor Pokharel said that the UML was not in favour of forging an alliance with any party in elections.

"You be clear that the UML is not in favour of forming an alliance. However, there may be an agreement at local level as per need," he said, addressing a press conference organized here today by the Press Chautari Nepal, Chitwan.

There might be a 'local adjustment' as per need, which he said is an old practice for the party. "We tried to follow the local adjustment practice in the parliamentary election in 2048 BS. It is not that we will be finished off without a coalition. We will not forge an alliance with any party in elections."

The party would try to emerge victorious in the elections with the help of their good activities done in the past and their commitments to development activities, he said.

He also criticised the Election Commission for changing colours of ballot papers for the May 13 local election 'without consultations with political parties'. RSS 

China has sent the military and thousands of healthcare workers into Shanghai to help carry out COVID-19 tests for all of its 26 million residents as cases continued to rise on Monday, in one of the country's biggest-ever public health responses, Reuters reported.

Some residents woke up before dawn for white-suited healthcare workers to swab their throats as part of nucleic acid testing at their housing compounds, many queuing up in their pyjamas and standing the required two metres apart.

The People's Liberation Army (PLA) on Sunday dispatched more than 2,000 medical personnel from across the army, navy and joint logistics support forces to Shanghai, an armed forces newspaper reported.

More than 10,000 healthcare workers from provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang and the capital Beijing have arrived in Shanghai, according to state media, which showed them arriving, suitcase-laden and masked up, by high-speed rail and aircraft, according to Reuters.

It is China's largest public health response since it tackled the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, where the novel coronavirus was first discovered in late 2019. The State Council said the PLA dispatched more than 4,000 medical personnel to the province of Hubei, where Wuhan is, at that time.

Shanghai, which began a two-stage lockdown on March 28 that has been expanded to confine practically all residents to their homes, reported 8,581 asymptomatic COVID-19 cases and 425 symptomatic COVID cases for April 3. It also asked residents to self-test on Sunday.

The city has emerged as a test of China's COVID elimination strategy based on testing, tracing and quarantining all positive cases and their close contacts.

The exercise in China's most populous city takes place on the eve of when Shanghai initially said it planned to lift the city's lockdown, Reuters reported.

The country has 12,400 institutions capable of processing tests from as many as 900 million people a day, a senior Chinese health official was reported as saying last month.

China's primarily uses pool testing, a process in which up to 20 swab samples are mixed together for more rapid processing.

The city has also converted multiple hospitals, gymnasiums, apartment blocks and other venues into central quarantine sites, including the Shanghai New International Expo Center which can hold 15,000 patients at full capacity.

On Monday, some residents said they received their results on their personal health app just over four hours after they were swabbed in the morning. But in other parts of the city some said they had yet to receive any notification on when their tests would be, according to Reuters.

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa dropped his brother as finance minister on Monday after calling for a unity government as protests against an economic crisis persisted and cracks emerged in the ruling coalition, Reuters reported.

The debt-laden country, run by Rajapaksa and his brothers in top positions, is struggling to pay for imports of fuel and other goods due to a scarcity of foreign exchange, leading to hours-long power cuts and a shortage of essentials.

Street protests against the government continued on Monday with crowds gathering in several towns, including in southern Tangalle where people holding posters and the national flag broke through police barricades, local media reported.

"Four ministers were appointed to ensure parliament and other tasks can be conducted in a lawful manner until a full Cabinet can be sworn in," Rajapaksa's media office said in a statement after cabinet ministers resigned in a bid to resolve the crisis.

It said Justice Minister Ali Sabry would be the new finance minister, replacing Gotabaya's brother Basil Rajapaksa, who was due to visit Washington this month for talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a loan programme, according to Reuters.

Previous ministers of foreign affairs, education and highways will keep their positions.

"The president invites all political parties representing in the parliament to come together to accept ministerial portfolios in order to find solutions to this national crisis," the president's media office said, calling for a unity government.

Central Bank of Sri Lanka Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal said on Twitter he had also offered to quit.

'OLD WINE'

Udaya Gammanpila, the chief of one of the 11 political parties comprising the ruling coalition, rejected Rajapaksa's move, calling the new cabinet "old wine in a new bottle".

"Our demand is for an all-party interim government to restore essential services and to hold a parliamentary election," Gammanpila of the Pivithuru Hela Urumaya party wrote on Twitter. "People should decide their next leaders, not anybody else."

Charmara Nakandala, a protester, said the cabinet changes were temporary attempts to placate the public, Reuters reported.

"This cabinet change is to try and fool the people," Nakandala, a marketing executive, said at a protest in Colombo, the main city. "This government is over. Rajapaksas no longer can save this by playing musical chairs."

Locals have no bound of happiness as the Jayanagar-Kurtha Rail service has operated finally. 

Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi jointly inaugurated the railway service from New Delhi on Saturday. 

The rail that left at 8.30 am on Sunday had arrived at Janakpur station at around 10.15 am the same day. 

The rail that reached Janakpur from Jayanagar through Kurtha on the first day since its opening was packed with passengers on both ordinary and AC seats, shared Director-General of Nepal Railway Company, Niranjan Jha. 

He further said the railway service is smooth and regular on its scheduled time. The timetable has been set in a way that the rail comes and goes twice a day, he added.

As per the timetable, the rail leaves from Jayanagar at 8.30 am and 3.00 pm while another rail leaves from Kurtha at 10.30 am and 5.15 pm. 

The dwellers of Dhanusha who had long been awaiting railway service now are elated with the smooth operation of rail. 

Sanjaya Jha, a local youth, expressed his confidence that the area in and around Janakpuir would transform within a few years with the smooth operation of railway service. 

He said the area would witness a huge inflow of religious tourists and local production would get market which he believed would change the landscape of the area. RSS

Nepal reported 33 new Covid-19 cases on Monday.

According to the Ministry of Health and Population, 2, 942 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which 32 returned positive. Likewise, 2, 117 people underwent antigen tests, of which one was tested positive.

The Ministry said that no one died of virus in the last 24 hours. The Ministry said that 89 infected people recovered from the disease.

As of today, there are 842 active cases in the country.