You're reading: Melnychenko ill, his questioning in Pukach case postponed

Pechersky District Court in Kyiv has postponed the questioning of former Major of the State Guard Department Mykola Melnychenko concerning Oleksiy Pukach, the main suspect in the case on the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze, due to Melnychenko's being taken ill.

Valentyna Telychenko, a representative of the journalist’s widow,
Myroslava Gongadze, told Interfax-Ukraine that the court had received a
medical certificate confirming that Melnychenko was ill and his request
to postpone his giving testimony.

The court hearing was postponed until 11 a.m.on Thursday.

Earlier, Melnychenko repeatedly said that he was ready to testify on a
number of high-profile cases, particularly on the Pukach case.

Gongadze went missing in Kyiv on September 16, 2000. A decapitated
corpse, which experts 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.

However, the body has yet to be buried, as the journalist’s mother
Lesia Gongadze refuses to recognize that it belongs to her son.

Pukach, the former head of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s external
surveillance department, who had long been on the wanted list, was
detained in Zhytomyr region on July 21, 2009, and has been kept in
custody since then.

In December 2010, the Prosecutor General’s Office announced that the
investigation into the criminal case was over. The investigation
confirmed that Pukach killed the journalist by order of then Interior
Minister Yuriy Kravchenko.

Kyiv’s Pechersky District Court has been considering the criminal case against Pukach since April 2011.

In November 2000, 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, was published in the parliament. Those tapes were allegedly
recorded by Melnychenko. However, the court refused to include
Melnychenko’s tapes as evidence in the case.