The Supreme Court of Ukraine has prolonged until Dec. 8 the arrest of Oleksiy Pukach, the former head of the external surveillance department of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, who has been accused of killing journalist Georgy Gongadze.
The court took this decision on October 7, according to the press service of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine.
The general term of Pukach’s detention was thus prolonged to 17 months.
As reported, journalist Georgy Gongadze disappeared in Kyiv on September 16, 2000. Experts came to the conclusion that a headless corpse found in a forest in Tarascha district in Kyiv region in November of the same year was likely to be his body. The body remains unburied, as the journalist’s mother has refused to have it interred before the head is found.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Oleksandr Medvedko said on June 17 that skull fragments found in Kyiv region in July 2009 were those of Gongadze.
In 2008, three former officials of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s foreign surveillance department and criminal intelligence unit – Colonels Valeriy Kostenko and Mykola Protasov, and Major Oleksandr Popovych, were found guilty of killing the journalist and sentenced to 12 (Kostenko and Popovych) and 13 (Protasov) years in prison.
Another suspect in the case, Oleksiy Pukach, the former chief of the main criminal investigation department at the ministry’s foreign surveillance unit, who was long on the wanted list, was arrested in Zhytomyr region on July 21, 2009, as a result of a joint operation by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Prosecutor General’s Office. On July 23, Kyiv Pechersky district court decided to remand Pukach, who was charged with being involved with Gongadze murder, in custody.
The Prosecutor General’s Office reported on September 14, 2010, that the pre-trial investigation into journalist Georgy Gongadze’s murder, allegedly by Oleksiy Pukach, and in relation to the late Yuriy Kravchenko, who is suspected of having ordered this crime, is drawing to an end.
