You're reading: Investigations under way involving mother, friend of murder victim Makar

Even nine months after her death, murder victim Oksana Makar cannot rest in peace.

A human
rights group says the 19-year-old Makar, who died in the southern Ukrainian
city of Mykolaiv after being gang raped and burned alive, was sexually
assaulted as a teenager by her mother’s friend. Activists from Mykolayiv’s
Ukraine Helsinki Group told the prosecutor’s office that Surovitska failed to
perform her parental duties and also forced Makar into prostitution.

Oksana Makar died from injuries suffered on March 9 when she was beaten, raped, choked and severely burned. Three men were convicted on Nov. 27 and sentenced to prison in the murder of the 18-year-old Mykolayiv woman.

Makar’s
mother, Tetiana Surovitska, could not be reached. But she did comment on the
accusations during a TV show aired on Ukraine’s STB channel on Dec. 17. “I was
a good mother. God help all mothers to be like that,” Surovitska said. However,
she confirmed that she knew that her close friend attempted to rape her
daughter Makar when the girl was a teenager.

Oksana Makar’s mother, Tetiana Surovitska (directpress.ru).

Mykolayiv’s
prosecutor’s office announced on Dec. 17 that a criminal investigation is under
way involving the mother’s friend. The
statute of limitations is 10 years for this type of sexual assault.

According to the
human rights group’s lawyer Anatoliy Ivaniuchenko, Surovitska knew that her
friend sexually assaulted Makar when she was 13 years old and did nothing about
it. The mother’s friend got her permission to take Makar from a boarding school
where she studied when she was 13 to live with him for the winter holidays.
Surovitska said the man offered better living conditions for her daughter. Helsinki’s
Ivaniuchenko claims that Makar ran away from him after he sexually assaulted
her, and she reported the crime to friends and teachers when she came back to
boarding school.

He says that
all these facts were revealed during the police investigation into Makar’s
case, but no case was launched against the man, whose whereabouts are unknown. “I
believe that all cases like that must get maximum attention, and that [the
suspect] must be found and punished as a pedophile,” says Ivaniuchenko.

Ivaniuchenko also accuses Surovitska of pushing her daughter Makar into
prostitution. He said Surovitska had taken Makar to Kyiv for some kind of
“work” when she was in high school. Also, during the trial that convicted
Makar’s three assailants, it was revealed that Makar was reported to police twice
for prostitution.

Another concern
people who have followed Makar’s plight say is money that people donated to
Makar.

Surovitska,
who collected the money, said that she received about $80,000 in donations for
her daughter’s treatment. When Makar died, Surovitska announced that the money
will go to Alexandra Popova, another young woman attacked in Mykolaiv on the
same day as Makar, who was in coma at the time.

Surovitska
says she only kept about $3,700 of donations for her personal expenses.
Meanwhile, Mykolaiv media reports say that she bought an apartment in Mykolaiv.
One of the apartments, according to Helsinki’s activists, cost $32,000. When Helsinki’s
activist spoke about that on the STB show, Surovitska acted aggressively but
didn’t deny the fact.

A Mykolayiv court on Nov. 27 convicted Yevhen
Krasnoschek, 23, Maksym Prisyazhnyuk, 24, and Artem Pogosyan, 22, were guilty
of gang raping, choking and burning Makar on March 9. She died later that month.
Krasnoschek was given a life sentence, while Prisyazhniuk and Pogosyan got 15
and 14 years in prison, respectively.

Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].