Former State Guard Department Major Mykola Melnychenko has said that it is necessary to complete the investigation into the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze.
“I personally believe that we need to bring to a logical end all of the crimes that were committed against Gongadze, against others, against Ukraine,” he told reporters outside the building of Pechersky District Court in Kyiv on Thursday, where he arrived as a witness for questioning in the case of Oleksiy Pukach.
“I’m absolutely sure that a mechanism for discrediting [First Deputy Prosecutor General] Rinat Kuzmin, the team investigating this case, as well as me as a witness, will be launched after my testimony today,” he said.
Melnychenko also claimed that he had recently been under surveillance by unidentified persons.
“In my opinion, it’s a special service subordinate to [Verkhovna Rada Chairman Volodymyr] Lytvyn,” he said.
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 not been buried until now, as the journalist’s mother Lesia Gongadze refuses to recognize that it belongs to her son.
Pukach, 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.
