After he left, the mass grave filled up with about 40 bodies, he said, of people who died during the Russian occupation. Local coroners from his office who stayed in the town had collected some of those bodies, he said.
On a visit on Sunday to the mass grave — about a dozen yards long and two yards wide — a pile of excavated dirt lay nearby to pile onto bodies. In one corner, two pairs of shoes and an arm protruded from a thin layer of dirt, and in another, a hand stuck out. On top of the pile, a half-dozen black body bags had been tipped into the pit.
By the end of the day, back in town, he said that he had picked up about 30 more bodies in a white van. Thirteen of them were men whose hands had been tied and who had been shot at close range in the head. He said he did not know the circumstances of their deaths but believed, based on their apparently recent deaths, that they were prisoners killed before the Russian Army withdrew.
“They were civilians,” Mr. Kaplishny said, showing cellphone pictures of dead men in civilian clothes with their hands bound behind their backs and in one case in the front.
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