The defense lawyers of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko have not yet participated in investigative actions in a criminal case on the murder of MP Yevhen Scherban, the head of the main department for investigating particular important cases at the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine, Andriy Kurys, has said.
“After Tymoshenko was handed, in accordance with the new Criminal Procedure Code, her notification as a suspect in the case, [her defense lawyer Serhiy] Vlasenko has not come even once at the invitation of the Prosecutor General’s Office to participate in investigative actions with Tymoshenko,” the media liaisons department of the Prosecutor General’s Office quoted him as saying on Tuesday.
He said that investigators were interested in conducting investigative measures with Tymoshenko, but the suspect’s lawyers do not want to do this.
Kurys also said that the prosecutor’s office received only on Tuesday a motion from the defense team requesting the receipt of the case materials.
“It will be considered within the term established by law, and the materials will be passed to the defense team,” he said.
As reported, 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.
Scherban’s son, Ruslan Scherban, a member of the Donetsk Regional Council, said at a press conference on April 4, 2012 that he had passed documents indicating to Tymoshenko’s and Lazarenko’s possible involvement in his father’s murder to the Prosecutor General’s Office.
On August 9, 2012, First Deputy Prosecutor General Renat Kuzmin said that the Prosecutor General’s Office possessed enough evidence to charge Tymoshenko with complicity in the 1996 murder of MP Yevhen Scherban.
On January 18, 2013, Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka said at a briefing on January 18 that the Prosecutor General’s Office had finished its investigation into the criminal case on the murder of MP Scherban, who was shot dead in 1996, and that Tymoshenko had been notified of being suspected of having organized the crime, along with Lazarenko.
Tymoshenko and Lazarenko have categorically denied being involved in the murder.
