You're reading: Gongadze murder: Will search for guilty end with Pukach?

The trial of Oleksiy Pukach, the former police general who remains the highest-ranking official charged in the 2000 kidnapping and murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, is coming to an end.

The verdict for Pukach could be announced on Jan. 29 after a trial that
has been conducted in secret.

The big question, however, is whether the
judge decides to end the case with Pukach or whether other former
high-ranking officials implicated in the murder, including ex-President
Leonid Kuchma and his former chief of staff, Volodymyr Lytvyn, will
continue to be investigated for alleged involvement in ordering the
crime.

Volodymyr Lytvyn

Valentyna Telychenko, lawyer of Gongazde’s widow, Myroslava, fears it’s
quite probable that the authorities will go no further than Pukach. She
would consider such a decision a grave injustice. “The state is doing
everything to stop with Pukach and not pursue those who ordered the
murder,” Telychenko said.

Gongadze, the opposition journalist and founder of the Ukrainska Pravda
news website, disappeared on Sept. 16, 2000. Months later, his beheaded
body was found in a forest outside of Kyiv.

In late November 2000, the tapes of Kuchma’s former bodyguard, Major
Mykola Melnychenko, were exposed in the Ukrainian parliament by
ex-Speaker Oleksandr Moroz.

The hundreds of hours of recordings
purportedly implicate Kuchma and other top officials in the Gongadze
case and numerous other crimes, exposing a gangster-like misrule of the
nation.

Leonid Kuchma

The authenticity of the tapes, however, has always been disputed
and Kuchma and others have denied wrongdoing.

However, most independent assessments accuse Kuchma of stonewalling
investigations into Gongadze and the tapes.

Viktor Yushchenko, who
succeeded Kuchma as president in 2005, vowed to bring those responsible
for Gongadze’s murder to trial.

That same year, ex- Interior Minister
Yuriy Kravchenko died of two gunshot wounds to the head. Authorities
called it a suicide. But he died the same day he was to give testimony
in the Gongadze case.

He was the immediate supervisor of Pukach who,
along with three other police officers, were implicated in actually
carrying out the murder.

The other three former police officers were convicted of assisting
Pukach in the abduction and murder of Gongadze. They were sentenced to
12 and 13 years of imprisonment in 2008.

Oleksiy Pukach

It wasn’t until 2009, however, that Pukach was arrested in a village in
Zhytomyr Oblast where he had been hiding for several years.

Authorities
say he confessed to strangling and beheading Gongadze on orders from
Kravchenko.

The prosecution has demanded life imprisonment for Pukach.

Telychenko
agrees that Pukach deserves such a sentence, but that’s not what she
wants to hear on Jan. 29.

She believes the court should return the
Pukach case to pre-trial investigation and incriminate him in a contract
murder, which will allow authorities to pursue charges against everyone
involved in the crime.

“Pukach personally had no complaints about Gongadze,” she said. “He says
he was carrying out instructions of Kravchenko, Kuchma and Lytvyn (then
head of the presidential administration) and other top officials, which
means he was acting by someone’s order and not by his own initiative.”

Telychenko added that she was surprised that the court didn’t call
either Kuchma nor Lytvyn as a witness for the trial even though Pukach
identified them as being involved.

Telychenko claims Pukach told the court the following: “I don’t
recognize the previous arrangement between me and my subordinates.
Instead I declare that there was an arrangement between Kuchma,
Kravchenko, Lytvyn and me.”

President Viktor Yanukovych promised in 2011 to “do everything” to
complete the investigation of the Gongadze case and punish all who were
guilty of the crime.

In March 2011, the prosecutor general opened a criminal probe into
Kuchma over Gongadze murder. But in December 2011, the court ruled that
it didn’t see any evidence that Kuchma was involved in the crime.

The
court also decided that Melnychenko’s tapes can’t be evidence in the
case as they were obtained illegally. Telychenko calls this court
decision itself illegal.

Hryhory Omelchenko, a former lawmaker who headed a parliamentary
commission investigating the Gongadze murder, agrees with her, saying
his commission had evidence about involvement of the top officials in
the murder as far back as 2004.

“The commission came to the conclusion
that Kuchma and Lytvyn were accomplices of the crime,” Omelchenko said.
“Lytvyn was the instigator and Kuchma gave this order to general
Kravchenko.”

Omelchenko believes the government has never had the will to fully
investigate Gongadze case, saying the prosecution’s decision to open the
case against Kuchma was probably sparked by sharp criticism in Europe,
whose officials have for years demanded that all accomplices to the
crime be brought to justice.

But Hryhory Demydenko, the lawyer for Pukach, said in an interview with
Segodnya daily newspaper that his client killed the journalist “by
accident” and did it after a “misunderstanding” of Kravchenko’s order.

“Nobody proved any evidence of intent. There are no motives. There is no
contract killing,” Demydenko said. He, however, believes there is a
high probability that the court will on Jan. 29 send the Pukach case
back for additional investigation, instead of handing down the sentence.

Telychenko said if the court sentences Pukach without incriminating him
in a contract murder she will bring the case to European Court of Human
Rights, basing her complaint on the unwillingness of the state to find
the guilty.

She believes the criminal probe against the former president
must be reopened.

“The cancellation by the court of a criminal case against Kuchma was a
violation of Myroslava Gongadze’s right to a fair trial, envisaged by
Article 6 of The European Convention on Human Rights,” she said.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]