The long saga of bringing former police general Oleksiy Pukach to trial for the Sept. 16, 2000 murder of Georgiy Gongadze took place mostly behind closed doors, with the only exception being the Jan. 29 hearing at which a three-judge panel convicted Pukach and sentenced him to life in prison.
But one of the few persons who has been privy to all the testimony, including the state secrets that authorities used as a justification to try Pukach in secret, is lawyer Valentyna Telychenko.
Telychenko had special status as the legal representative of Myroslava Gongadze, the slain journalist’s widow. Telychenko said her client will appeal the verdict because the court ignored testimony implicating ex-President Leonid Kuchma and his former chief of staff, Volodymyr Lytvyn, in the murder conspiracy.
She talked to the Kyiv Post about the highlights of the testimony she heard.
She said Pukach testified that there “was no conspiracy between him and his three subordinates” to kill Gongadze. The other three — Mykola Protasov, Oleksandr Popovych and Valeriy Kostenko – were convicted and sentenced to 12-13 years in prison in 2008 for carrying out the kidnapping and murder with Pukach.
Pukach, according to Telychenko, said that the conspiracy existed among him, his immediate supervisor, Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, Lytvyn and Kuchma.
He repeated several times that he had a clear order from Kravchenko to gather information and then kidnap Gongadze, according to Telychenko. She said that Pukach testified that Kravchenko told him this was the task ordered by the president and that Pukach felt he could not disobey an order from the commander-in-chief.
Telychenko also relayed these highlights that she said came from Pukach’s testimony:
Pukach said he was in Kravchenko’s office when Kuchma called him on the government telephone line and asked if Kravchenko is working “in the direction of Gongadze.” Pukach said that he had received the order from Kravchenko to kill, burn and bury Gongadze.
Pukach also said that he was in Kravchenko’s office in the Interior Ministry when Lytvyn walked in and Kravchenko told everyone to leave the cabinet, except for Pukach. The three of them had a conversation about the kidnapping and murder of Gongadze.
Before the kidnapping, Pukach says he told his driver to get a canister of petrol and place it in the car. He also drove to his former father-in-law’s house in the village of Sukholisy and picked up a shovel and rope there.
Then, Pukach’s testimony gets contradictory, according to Telychenko.
He claimed in court that he did not want to kill Gongadze and started choking him to get secret information from him. He bizarrely tried to convince the court that Gongadze was a spy, a criminal involved in robberies and smuggling goods, and was organizing “wars between continents,” according to Myroslava Gongadze’s lawyer.
Pukach says that, when he was choking Gongadze, he accidently went too far and killed him – a contradiction, Telychenko said from his other testimony that he was obeying a presidential order to kill Gongadze.
However, Telychenko says the prosecution of Pukach should not be underestimated.
“First of all, the general, one of the highest-ranking officials in the Interior Ministry has been prosecuted. Also, it is important that it is acknowledged that the killing was a result of Gongadze’s professional activities as a journalist,” Telyshenko says.
She gives the most credit to three investigators of the General Prosecutor’s Office: Roman Shubin, Yuriy Stolyarchuk and Yuriy Hryshchenko who were responsible for the case.
“The most important was in 2005. Then, the investigation led to the incarceration of Popovych, Protasov and Kostenko. They gave clear evidence and pointed to Pukach as the organizer. After this it became impossible to conceal anything and Pukach could not have avoided justice. The (government) authorities have come to terms with this,” says Telychenko.
Telychenko says holding the entire Pukach trial behind closed doors was not justified.
The official reason was that the hearings contain state secrets. Only several people were allowed in – aside from judges, Telychenko and Pukach, there was Andriy Fedur, a lawyer of Gongadze’s mother Lesya, and Oles Podolsky, former journalist who was kidnapped and beaten by Pukach’s team not long before Gongadze in 2000.
Everyone present during the hearings had to pass a background investigation by the Security Service of Ukraine, SBU, to gain approval to obtain access to state secrets.
“It was completely unnecessary to have all the hearings secret, as the state secrets were revealed at a couple of hearings at most,” Telychenko says. “Most of the state secrets revealed were regarding the methods of how the undercover department of the police operated – still in use now. Also, some names of people from this department were revealed. For example there are methods like changing the plates of cars which undercover policemen use. Pukach, for instance, ordered and used German plates for this purpose. I can speak about this part of the state secret because for some reason it is a part of the official text of the verdict.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be reached at [email protected].
