Lesia Gongadze, the mother of journalist Georgy Gongadze who was killed in 2000, has said that she will not recognize her son's death and is planning to defend his honor and dignity in court.
While commenting on the verdict brought by Kyiv’s Pechersky District Court against the former chief of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s external surveillance department, Oleksiy Pukach, on January 29, Gongadze said: “In fact, I’m totally indifferent to how many years this man would have been sentenced – to life or 20 years, because I will not recognize the fact of my son’s death. [The body] shown by the prosecutor’s office does not belong to my son,” she said in an interview with Deursche Welle, which was published on its Web site on Wednesday.
When asked whether the verdict, in her opinion, could be the last point in a 12-year-old case on Gongadze’s murder, she said: “Of course, this is the end, a big point with no trace of a crime, so that no one could ever be able to identify the customers, who actually wanted to destroy my son. Everything will end at Pukach and the late [former Interior Minister Yuriy] Kravchenko, because it’s advantageous to them.”
Gongadze also stated that now she has a different purpose in the case.
“I want to defend the honor and dignity of my son in court,” she said.
According to the journalist’s mother, she has asked the Prosecutor General’s Office for six months to provide her with a free public lawyer who would represent her interests in court.
“We’re talking about the fact that high-ranking officials of the Interior Ministry, immediately after [Gongadze’s] disappearance, named the scenarios of the murder at their briefings and ‘made’ him a mercenary, a swindler with debt, and even a killer. They must answer for these words. All of these statements were published in several print media with reference to [former First Deputy Interior Minister] Mykola Dzhyha,” Gongadze said.
She said she wanted to get a lawyer from the prosecutor’s office, because she has no money for the services of a private lawyer, and, in addition, her case is “a war against the authorities, and private lawyers are a business that cannot withstand a prolonged confrontation.”
“That’s why I need a state lawyer,” the journalist’s mother said.
On January 29, 2013, Kyiv’s Pechersky District Court found former chief of the external surveillance department of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, Oleksiy Pukach, guilty of killing Gongadze and sentenced him to life in prison. The court also stripped Pukach of his lieutenant general rank and obliged him to pay UAH 500,000 to Gongadze’s widow, Myroslava Gongadze, and UAH 100,000 to journalist Oleksiy Podolsky.
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.
