Pechersky District Court in Kyiv will continue to question former State Guard Department Major Mykola Melnychenko as a witness in the case of Oleksiy Pukach, the main suspect in the case of the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze and former chief of the external surveillance department of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, on Tuesday, Dec. 11.
Valentyna Telychenko, a lawyer for Gongadze’s widow, Myroslava Gongadze, told Interfax-Ukraine that on Monday, the court was obliged to adjourn the meeting and move it to Tuesday due to a petition lodged by Melnychenko in which he asked the court to postpone the questioning due to his poor health (high blood pressure).
Telychenko also noted that on Monday, Pukach again said that the reason for Gongadze’s murder was his anti-state sentiments and a bad attitude to former President Leonid Kuchma and his policies.
The trial on Tuesday will begin at 1200.
Gongadze went missing in Kyiv on September 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 yet to be buried, as the journalist’s mother Lesia Gongadze refuses to recognize that it belongs to her son.
Pukach, the former head of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s external surveillance department, 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.
