The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine (PGO) is continuing to investigate the suspected complicity of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma in the assassination of independent journalist Georgy Gongadze in 2000, a top prosecutor said.
"The investigation is continuing, witnesses are being interrogated. I won't venture to say when the investigation will finish," First Deputy Prosecutor General Renat Kuzmin told Forbes magazine.
In comments on Kuchma likening him to Andrei Vyshinsky, a 1930s Soviet prosecutor general who masterminded the Great Purge, Stalin’s campaign of mass-scale political repression, Kuzmin said: “Let that stay on his conscience. Surely Kuchma knows his role in this affair and what danger this criminal case and the evidence that we have collected poses to him.”
In February, Kuzmin told the Ekho Moskvy radio that the PGO possessed enough evidence to accuse the ex-president of ordering Gongadze’s murder.
Kuchma dismissed this as “another regular instance of provocation,” claimed there could be no evidence of his alleged involvement in the crime, and slammed Kuzmin as a “reincarnation” of Vyshinsky.
Gongadze disappeared on September 16, 2000. Forensic experts said a headless corpse found in a forest near Kyiv in November that year might be Gongadze’s body and that cranium fragments found in Kyiv region in 2009 were definitely parts of his skull.
However, the body remains unburied as Gongadze’s mother refuses to recognize it as her son’s remains.
Kuchma was charged by the Prosecutor General’s Office on March 21, 2011, of abusing power that led to Gongadze’s murder, but Pechersky District Court dropped the charges on December 13, 2011, refusing to accept former presidential bodyguard Mykola Melnychenko’s audiotapes as evidence.
Kuchma denies his complicity in Gongadze’s murder.
On January 29, 2013, Pechersky Court found Oleksiy Pukach, former head of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s outdoor surveillance department, guilty of killing Gongadze and sentenced him to life in prison. Pukach was stripped of his rank as lieutenant-general.
Asked by the judge whether he understands the sentence, Pukach replied, “I will understand the sentence when Kuchma and Lytvyn [a former member of the presidential secretariat and later Verkhovna Rada Chairman Volodymyr Lytvyn] are jailed along with me.”
