Clashes between riot police and protesters left at least a dozen people injured in Kiev, Ukraine Friday night, local media reported.
The scuffles began when activists hemmed in paddy wagons with their cars outside a court. The activists were protesting a six-year sentence, issued earlier Friday, to three men accused of trying to blow up a Lenin statue in 2011.
Riot police from the feared elite Berkut unit came to support them and then started attacking the protesters after they began shaking one of the buses, activists told the Kyiv Post. Three members of parliament were among those injured.
Opposition leader and former interior minister Yuri Lutsenko attempted to mediate, but was himself violently beaten by riot police.
Lutsenko lost consciousness after riot police cracked open his skull, his wife Irina told the opposition news site Ukrainska Pravda. A correspondent for the site later reported that Lutsenko suffered a traumatic brain injury.
Tensions remain high in the former Soviet state since President Viktor Yanukovych's abrupt refusal to sign a deal with the EU and subsequent police violence sparked the biggest protests there since 2004's Orange Revolution.
