The husband of a killed Ukrainian family says his wife is still in the morgue

The grieving husband and father of Ukrainian woman and two children killed when he tried to flee Kyiv five days ago, says his wife’s body is still in a body bag on the floor of a crowded morgue.

Sergii Perebeinis arrived in Kyiv on Wednesday to bury his loved ones but said their funerals had to be postponed because the morgues were full of civilian war casualties.

He said his wife Tatiana Perebeinis’ body was “lying in a black bag on the floor” of a morgue.

Perebeinis did not say where the remains of his children – Mykyta, 18, and Alisa, 9 – were.

“I’m trying to persevere but it’s really hard,” Perebeinis said in a Facebook post.

The family were killed by Russian mortar fire on Sunday as they tried to run across a damaged bridge in Irpin, just outside Kyiv.

They died along with another man, Anatoly Berezhnyi, 26, who was a church volunteer who helped them escape.

The harrowing images of their bodies strewn on the street with their suitcases and a dog carrier sparked outrage around the world.

Perebeinis, who was away from his family while caring for his ailing mother elsewhere in Ukraine, said her dogs also died in the attack.

In conversation with the New York TimesPerebeinis said he found out about his family’s murder via Twitter.

said Perebeinis he knew the evacuation route they had planned after last speaking to his wife on Saturday night.

He said he was trying to track his family’s location through a cell phone app. Perebeinis knew something had gone wrong when the tracker showed the phone was in a Kiev hospital and no one was answering his calls.

Perebeinis then saw a Twitter post of the scene after reading reports that a family had been killed by a mortar attack on the planned route.

“I recognized the luggage and that’s how I knew it,” he said of the blood-stained suitcases and backpacks the family was carrying. The objects were photographed next to their bodies.

Perebeinis said he has since met with some witnesses who “handed me some of the personal belongings that were left near the bodies in the street”.

Tatiana was Chief Accountant at SE Ranking, a Silicon Valley startup headquartered in London with a large workforce in Kyiv.

Despite being asked by her company to leave Ukraine, she did not leave Ukraine sooner due to concerns about how to bring her mother, who has Alzheimer’s, back home.

Tatiana’s mother and father were right behind the family when they were killed, but they were not injured in the attack.