Kyiv's Pechersky District Court has decided to question former State Guard Department Major Mykola Melnychenko as a witness in a criminal case on the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze against Oleksiy Pukach, the former head of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry's external surveillance department, and summoned him for questioning at 11:00 on Thursday.
Valentyna Telychenko, the lawyer for the journalist’s widow, Myroslava Gongadze, told Interfax-Ukraine that she made a motion and the court satisfied it.
“The court has satisfied the motion and summoned Melnychenko for questioning at 11:00 on November 22,” the lawyer said.
Melnychenko told the agency that he was planning to come to the court and testify.
Earlier, Melnychenko said numerous times that he was ready to testify on a number of high-profile cases, particularly on the Pukach case.
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.
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.
