Ex-President Leonid Kuchma's former bodyguard went missing this autumn.
A Kyiv court on Oct. 18 issued an arrest warrant for Mykola Melnychenko, the former presidential security guard who claims to have secretly recorded conversations that allegedly implicate ex-President Leonid Kuchma and other top officials in murder and other serious crimes.
The development comes days after Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka said that authorities are searching for Melnychenko, who they say is under investigation for treason but went missing this autumn.
“There is an international search warrant for Melnychenko, who is evading the investigation,” Yuriy Boychenko, spokesperson for the general prosecutor’s office, told Interfax-Ukraine news agency on Nov. 10.
A controversial figure, Melnychenko claims that his recordings caught Kuchma and Volodymyr Lytvyn, his former chief of staff and current parliament speaker, engaging in criminal activities, including a plot to kill Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze on Sept. 16, 2000.
Kuchma was charged earlier this year with exceeding his authority by giving orders that led to the murder of Gongadze.
Kuchma and Lytvyn have repeatedly denied such allegations and dismiss Melnychenko’s credibility.
In an Oct. 13 telephone interview with the Kyiv Post, Melnychenko said he fled to the U.S. in early October after receiving information that his life was threatened. His current whereabouts are unclear.
Kuchma’s lawyers said Melnychenko likely fled to avoid justice, but the ex-security guard told the Kyiv Post that he is “not hiding from any investigation.”
Melnichenko told Kommersant daily on Nov. 10 that he would come back to Ukraine to give evidence at Kuchma’s trial despite the warrant.
There is currently no date set for the trial.
Former police general Oleksiy Pukach is currently on trial for physically carrying out the murder of Gongadze, a case which has repeatedly been covered up and continues to haunt Ukraine.
According to Valentyna Telychenko, a lawyer representing Gongadze’s widow in the closed trial, Pukach has given testimony that he conducted the murder upon orders of superiors, insisting Kuchma and Lytvyn knew about the plot. But Pukach has given conflicting testimony, according to Telychenko.
Three of Pukach’s subordinates were convicted in recent years of killing Gongadze and are serving prison sentences.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at [email protected].
