Pechersky District Court in Kyiv has separated the case against the former external surveillance chief at Ukraine's Interior Ministry, Oleksiy Pukach, on charges of the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze, from material concerning the late former Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, and sent them for further investigation.
"The court has granted a petition for the return to the prosecutor for further investigation of the case that concerns Kravchenko… The court decided to detach these materials from the case and return them to the prosecutor for further investigation," the lawyer of the journalist’s mother Lesia Gongadze, Andriy Fedur, reported on Thursday after the court’s meeting.
The next hearing of Pukach’s case will take start at 11.00 on Aug. 30.
Gongadze went missing in Kyiv on Sept. 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.
In 2008, three former officers from the Ukrainian Interior Ministry External Surveillance and Criminal Intelligence Department, Col. Valeriy Kostenko, Col. Mykola Protasov, and Maj. Oleksandr Popovych, were found guilty of killing Gongadze.
Former head of the Interior Ministry’s External Surveillance Department Oleksiy Pukach, another suspect in the case, was detained in the Zhytomyr region on July 21, 2009.
The Prosecutor General’s Office said on Dec. 6, 2010, that it had completed the investigation into the criminal case against Pukach.
The pre-trial investigation established that on the night from September 16 to Sept. 17, 2000, Oleksiy Pukach, under the instructions of Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko and other officials, [and] in preliminary agreement with a group of persons, committed the premeditated murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze, because the victim was fulfilling public and journalistic duties, the prosecutor’s office said.
On March 4, 2005 ex-Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko was found dead in his home at Koncha-Zaspa outside Kyiv with two gunshot wounds in his head.
A day earlier, he had been questioned as part of the inquiry into the Gongadze murder.
The Prosecutor General’s Office in February 2007 closed the investigation "in the absence of elements essential to the crime." It claimed Kravchenko had committed suicide.
