Confidential case file materials in a controversial murder suggest that a father and son may be innocent in the murder of a Kyiv judge in 2011, even though they’ve been found guilty and are serving prison sentences.
The materials
appeared on a file sharing website last month and contain photographed
documents from the murder case that include inconsistencies and contradictions
with the official version of the murder.
The Kyiv Post
examined the materials, which point to a body of evidence omitted from the
official version because it appears to exonerate the accused perpetrators and
damage the prosecutors’ case.
The materials relate
to the March 21, 2011 murder of a 42-year-old Kyiv judge Serhiy Zubkov.
On Oct. 2, a Kyiv
court found Dmytro Pavlychenko and his son Serhiy guilty for his murder and
sentenced the father, to life in prison, and the son, Serhiy to 13 years. Since
then, many people –including celebrities and other prominent people — have
come out in support of releasing the Pavlychenkos, of whom the son was well-known
in the football community as a fan of Dynamo Kyiv.
Authorities have
defended the case as well-documented and well-investigated and say the right
people were convicted.
However,
authorities say they found a wheelchair on the first floor of the residential
building where Zubkov lived that was left there by Dmytro Pavlychenko after the
murder. They say Dmytro’s fingerprints matched those found on the wheelchair.
Yet, according to
the case materials made public, authorities first found four usable
fingerprints on the wheelchair. But when Dmytro was detained and fingerprinted
on March 24, three days after the murder, investigators ordered a repeat
forensic study of the wheelchair.
This time, they
sent fingerprint markings on adhesive tape for analysis, not the actual
wheelchair, suggesting the prints could have been retrieved anywhere. Moreover,
authorities sent five fingerprints for repeat analysis while only four useable
prints were found on the wheelchair.
Authorities say
they placed the son, Serhiy, at the crime scene because he had left his
blood-soaked gym shoes and jogging pants on the first floor of the residential
building.
But the case file
shows a picture of one of the gym shoes without blood, and whose sole markings
don’t match the one found at the crime scene on the 7th floor where
the judge was murdered.
The leaked
information also indicates that a police dog followed the sole print in the
opposite direction that police say Serhiy had fled. The route the police dog
took leads to a second sole print identical to the one found on the 7th
floor murder scene, which doesn’t match the found gym shoe.
Authorities also
say Serhiy put the judge’s trousers and shoes on, even though the judge had
died of numerous knife and gunshot wounds, suggesting his clothes also had
blood on it.
In court, Serhiy
said the murder confession he gave to investigators was given under extreme
duress.
Kyiv’s police on
Jan. 31 denied pressuring Serhiy, stating that “information regarding threats
made by the police toward Serhiy Pavlychenko are not true.”
The leaked
information also contains material that authorities believed there was a third
person at the crime scene, but which was omitted in their official
version.
Authorities say
the Pavlychenkos’ murder motive was revenge.
Zubkov, the judge,
had evicted the Pavlychenko family from their centrally located Kyiv apartment
in a December 2010 ruling in favor of Gooioord BV, a Dutch real estate
developer.
As a judge, Zubkov had
presided over many property development disputes involving powerful companies
and residents. He made several rulings leading up to his death in favor of the
public interest, including over a property on Honchara Street, just blocks from
the Saint Sophia Square on which the Kyiv
Post had reported.
In his ruling, he prevented
a company from developing a property on 17/23 Honchara Street and denied the
developer Hr 560,000 in damages it sought from activists for removing an
enclosure around the
development. Zubkov also put a halt to a property development near Kyiv’s
Zhovtneva Hospital. And on Sept. 15, 2010, the judge left kindergarten No. 183
in public ownership,
ruling against another property developer.
Supporters of the Pavlychenkos also point to a Nov. 7 high special court ruling
that cancelled Zubkov’s
eviction of the Pavlychenko family. And on March 24, 2011, three days after
Zubkov’s murder, the High Council of Justice, the government body that fires
and hires judges, was supposed to start a hearing into whether Zubkov had
violated judicial ethics.
The alleged
whistleblower who sent the Kyiv Post an e-mail message on Jan. 31 that included the Internet address of the file sharing website said the information was made public “on behalf of all
prosecutors who still have a conscience left,” adding that he cannot “look at
such a disgrace with what is being done in the name of the public prosecutor’s
office in the courts anymore.”
The anonymous
e-mailer furthermore wrote that “when the (murder) case is thrown together so
insolently and thoughtlessly, then it’s clear to even the inexperienced (law
enforcer) that (the case) received approval from very high up.”
The alleged
prosecutor didn’t respond to an e-mailed Kyiv Post request to meet in person to
verify his credentials and claims.
In response, the
Kyiv City Prosecutor’s Office on Feb. 6 called the partial murder case file disclosure
“nothing but pressure on the courts” since the murder case is currently being
heard by an appeals court.
Prosecutors also vowed
they will prosecute the perpetrators who leaked the case file materials.
“An investigation
is under way regarding (the leak), whose end result will see the issue of
justice brought to the guilty persons,” said state prosecutor Nataliya Syoma in
the Feb. 6 statement.
Law enforcement
authorities have maintained they conducted an unbiased and objective murder
investigation and are certain the father and son are guilty.
A lawyer for the
Pavlychenkos, Tatyana Shevchenko, told the Kyiv Post the photographed materials
that were made public are from the judge’s murder case, which she has examined.
The nation convicts more than 90 percent of people charged with crimes,
and almost all of them without any jury trials. According to European Court of
Human Rights Judge from Ukraine Anna Yudkivska, Ukraine had the second highest
number of claims – some 10,000 –submitted to the court in 2012.
The next hearing of the appeal court trial of the murder case is
scheduled for March 12.
Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected].
