Judge of Pechersky District Court of Kyiv Oksana Tsarevych has postponed questioning of a witness in the case on the murder of MP Yevhen Shcherban in 1996, which was to involve former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko via a video linkup, for 2 p.m. on Feb. 7.
The questioning of the witness in the Scherban case was earlier scheduled for Wednesday in the building of the Court of Appeals, an Interfax-Ukraine correspondent reported.
Tymoshenko was expected to participate in this meeting via a video linkup.
However, the judge said that the court received Tymoshenko’s request to postpone the questioning of the witness due to the fact that she was not ready to participate, as she was not notified about this event in time.
As reported, Yevhen Scherban, a member of the Liberal Party’s executive committee and a parliamentarian, was gunned down while disembarking from a plane at the Donetsk airport on November 3, 1996. The killers fled the scene in a car. Scherban, his wife and a mechanic died from injuries on the spot. The plane’s flight engineer suffered injuries to his neck and later died in a hospital. Law enforcement agencies ruled out a political motive behind the crime.
Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka announced on January 18, 2013, that the Prosecutor General’s Office had completed an investigation into Scherban’s murder and notified Tymoshenko that she was suspected, along with former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, of organizing the parliamentarian’s killing for mercenary reasons. Pshonka said also that the case concerning Scherban’s murder had been combined with the case on the embezzlement of budget money for settling the Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine’s (UESU) debts to the Russian Defense Ministry.
