Ukrainian authorities took a page out of the novel-turned-horror flick “Carrie” — dousing with pigs’ blood the reporter whose death they were faking, it was revealed Thursday.
Arkady Babchenko had been pictured lying face-down in a puddle of blood in a graphic photo released Tuesday, when news of his assassination was announced.
But the former war correspondent was smeared in swine blood with the help of a makeup artist, he said during a joint interview in Kiev on Thursday.
Babchenko, 41, detailed how he was taken to a morgue in an ambulance — where he changed clothes and watched reports of his supposed violent death on TV.“Once the gates of the morgue closed behind me, I was resurrected,” he said, according to the Moscow Times. “Then I watched the news and saw what a great guy I had been.”
The journalist shocked friends, colleagues and observers when he turned up alive, a day after officials said he’d been shot dead in his apartment. Authorities said the ruse was meant to flush out Moscow-backed assassins hunting Babchenko — who fled to Kiev in early 2017 after receiving death threats for expressing anti-Kremlin sentiments.
Babchenko told fellow reporters he initially wanted to refuse to participate in the plot when Ukrainian officials approached him about it a month ago.
“My first reaction was: ‘To hell with you, I want to pack a bag and disappear to the North Pole,'” he said. “But then I realized, where do you hide? Skripal also tried to hide,” he added, referring to the Russian ex-spy who was poisoned in the UK with a nerve agent.
The reporter also shot back at critics of the ruse, after already telling them to “go f–k themselves.”
“Everyone who says this undermines trusts in journalists: What would you do in my place, if they came to you and said, ‘There is a hit out on you’?” he asked.
A man who allegedly was paid $40,000 by the Russian security service to organize and carry out the hit on Babchenko was detained Wednesday.
Babchenko is now living in a secure apartment and says he plans to “get some decent sleep, maybe get drunk and then wake up in two or three days.”
In “Carrie,” the unpopular teen, played by Sissy Spacek in the 1976 film based on the Stephen King novel, gets pigs’ blood dumped on her at the prom as part of a vicious prank by the popular kids.
With Post wires