Pechersky District Court in Kyiv on Monday ended a judicial investigation into a case on charges brought against former chief of the external surveillance department of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry Oleksiy Pukach regarding the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze, and scheduled for December 27 a debate between the parties in the process.
“The court today finished the questioning of witnesses, and thus ended the judicial investigation, scheduling the debate for December 27,” Valentyna Telychenko, the lawyer for Gongadze’s widow Myroslava Gongadze, told reporters on Monday.
She said the court had rejected her petition to send the case back for further investigation regarding the establishment of Pukach’s motives for the murder of the journalist.
Telychenko said that the next court hearing should be held on December 27 at 1100.
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 cas
