Kyiv's Pechersky District Court can retire to the deliberations room on December 27 to pass a sentence on former head of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry's external surveillance department Oleksiy Pukach, who is charged with killing of journalist Georgy Gongadze.
“It’s highly probable that the court will retire to the deliberations
room tomorrow to pass the sentence,” the defense counsel of the late
journalist’s wife, Myroslava Gongadze, Valentyna Telychenko, said.
Georgy Gongadze, the late editor of the Ukrayinska Pravda Web
publication, 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.
In 2008, three former officers from the Ukrainian Interior Ministry
External Surveillance and Criminal Intelligence Department, Col. Valeriy
Kostenko, Col. Mykola Protasov, and Maj. Oleksandr Popovych, were found
guilty of killing Gongadze. Former head of the Interior Ministry’s
External Surveillance Department Oleksiy Pukach, another suspect in the
case, was detained in the Zhytomyr region on July 21, 2009.
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.
Oleksiy 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.
