The Pechersky District Court in Kyiv has again postponed the hearing of the case against the former external surveillance chief at Ukraine's Interior Ministry, Oleksiy Pukach, on charges of the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze.
The sitting was postponed from July 28 until 1000 on August 11, said Valentyna Telychenko, the lawyer for the journalist’s widow Myroslava Gongadze.
"Today the trial of Pukach has been postponed once again. Today’s reason for the break is that the injured party [Oleksiy] Podolsky has not yet been granted access to state secrets, and, in addition, Podolsky did not appear at today’s hearing," she told reporters.
According to Telychenko, three months have passed since Pukach’s case was transferred to Pechersky District Court in Kyiv, however over this time they have only managed to establish the identity of the defendant.
She also expressed surprise that although Pukach’s case was sent to court much earlier that the cases against Ukraine’s ex-premier Yulia Tymoshenko and former interior minister Yuriy Lutsenko, it’s consideration had been delayed.
Journalist Gongadze, the late editor of the Ukrayinska Pravda Web publication, went missing in Kyiv on Sept. 16, 2000.
In November 2000 a decapitated body was found in the woods near Kyiv. Experts concluded the body might have been that of the journalist.
In May 2010, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Oleksandr Medvedko said that the remains of a skull found in the Kyiv region in July 2009 were those of Gongadze.
In 2008, three former officers from the Ukrainian Interior Ministry Outdoor Surveillance and Criminal Intelligence Department, Col. Valeriy Kostenko, Col. Mykola Protasov, and Maj. Oleksandr Popovych, were found guilty of killing Gongadze.
Pukach, another suspect in the case, was detained in the Zhytomyr region on July 21, 2009.
On July 23, Kyiv Pechersky district court decided to remand Pukach, who was charged with being involved with Gongadze murder, in custody.
The Prosecutor General’s Office reported on September 14, 2010, that the pre-trial investigation into Gongadze’s murder, allegedly by Oleksiy Pukach, and in relation to the late Yuriy Kravchenko, who is suspected of having ordered this crime, is drawing to an end.
Public figure and political analyst Oleksiy Podolsky was attacked and kidnapped in June 2000. In May 2007, Kyiv Court of Appeal sentenced two former employees of the main department of criminal investigation of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry to three years in prison for this crime.
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