The body of pump operator Valery Khodemchuk, killed immediately by the blast or by falling debris, remained buried beneath the wreckage of the reactor hall; his colleague Vladimir Shashenok, who had died as a result of physical trauma and thermal burns a few hours later in the Pripyat hospital, had been laid to rest in the graveyard of a small village near the power station. Since then, twenty-nine more victims—operators, firemen, and security staff—had succumbed to the effects of acute radiation syndrome in the radiology wards of Kiev and the specialized clinic in Moscow. Of the thirteen
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