The Pechersky District Court of Kyiv has postponed the hearings of a criminal case opened against Oleksiy Pukach, the former head of the foreign surveillance department of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, who is charged with the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze.
The hearings have been postponed for ten days, and will start at 1000 on July 28.
Valentyna Telychenko, the lawyer for the journalist’s widow, Myroslava Gongadze, said that this was due to the fact that a representative of the journalist’s mother, Lesia Gongadze, had not arrived in court and that there was no information whether he was properly notified of the court hearings.
"The court hearings have been postponed until 1000 on July 28," Telychenko said.
Gongadze went missing in Kyiv on September 16, 2000. A decapitated corpse, which experts have claimed could be that of Gongadze, was found in a forest outside Kyiv in November 2000.
In May 2010 Ukrainian Prosecutor General Oleksandr Medvedko stated that fragments of a skull found in July 2009 in Kyiv region belonged to Gongadze.
On November 28, 2000, Ukrainian Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz published a transcript of several tapes pointing to the involvement of then Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and other officials in a number of high-profile crimes, including the Gongadze murder.
The tapes also contained evidence of pressure being put on other Ukrainian politicians and journalists.
On March 4, 2005 ex-Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko was found dead in his home at Koncha-Zaspa outside Kyiv with two gunshot wounds in his head.
A day earlier, he had been questioned as part of the inquiry into the Gongadze murder.
In 2008, three former officers from the Ukrainian Interior Ministry External Surveillance and Criminal Intelligence Department, Col. Valeriy Kostenko, Col. Mykola Protasov, and Maj. Oleksandr Popovych, were found guilty of killing Gongadze.
Former head of the Interior Ministry’s External Surveillance Department Oleksiy Pukach, another suspect in the case, was detained in the Zhytomyr region on July 21, 2009. The criminal case against Kuchma for his involvement in the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze was opened on March 21, 2011.
The second Ukrainian president is charged with exceeding his authority and giving unlawful instructions to Interior Ministry officials, which subsequently led to Gongadze’s murder
