Quick thread, story coming shortly: Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine have been staging events showing attacks on civilians, and may have even used human corpses to make them look more convincing. ⚠️thread contains graphic imagery.⚠️ 
About a day ago, the official Donetsk People's Republic Telegram account posted the images below and accused “Ukrainian saboteurs” of “detonating an explosive device on the Donetsk-Gorlovka highway,” killing three.
2. A few hours later, media, escorted by DPR officials, arrived at the scene. One American journalist posted high-resolution images of one of the badly burned bodies.
Twitter quickly pointed out that the nature of the break in the skull looked suspicious, so I found an expert. Dr. Victor Weedn has a spent a career in forensic pathology, and has experience examining the aftermath of IED blasts as a former armed forces medical examiner.
Dr. Weedn examined multiple images and angles of the skull that the reporter helpfully made available on Twitter and Youtube. His expert opinion: “It’s a typical cut made to remove the skullcap as performed during an autopsy.” He noted there is "no chance" heat could cause this.
The cut is typical of a bone saw. He also noted that a small hole in the skull exhibited “beveling,” suggesting an exit wound from a bullet rather than IED shrapnel.
There appears to be another body in the vehicle, but its too burned to make any sort of judgements. Raises questions of who these people were and where their bodies were held.
There are other problems with the scene. As @GlasnostGone pointed out, the damage does not look typical of a vehicle destroyed in an IED blast. Perfectly round holes in the vehicle appear to be bullet holes, rather than the result of shrapnel.
tl;dr – It looks like the DPR separatists grabbed at least one dead body that had been autopsied, placed it in a car, and torched it, and then staged an IED attack to be blamed on “Ukrainian saboteurs.” Reporters were then brought to the scene and were happy to amplify.
This is just one of several very sloppy, immediately debunked separatist and Kremlin false flags accusing Ukrainians of violence and sabotage. See these two stories: theguardian.com/world/2022/feb…
and
axios.com/telegram-ukrai…
and
axios.com/telegram-ukrai…
Stay tuned. Story with @twiceanya for @gridnews coming soon.
Autopsied bodies and false flags grid.news/story/misinfor…
Read my coverage with @twiceanya here: grid.news/story/misinfor…
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