The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine (PGO) has not handed over all of the materials of the criminal case on the murder of Ukrainian parliamentarian Yevhen Scherban, who was shot dead in 1996, to the defense team of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the ex-premier's defense lawyer, Oleksandr Plakhotniuk, has said.
According to a posting on the Web site of the Batkivschyna Party, the PGO informed Plakhotniuk that he could read the materials of the case on Thursday, January 31.
“However, today, when I came to the PGO, it appeared that the investigators could not give me all of the materials of the case. It is forbidden to hand over to the defense team the key episodes allegedly containing testimonies of witnesses regarding Yulia Tymoshenko’s involvement in the murder of Scherban,” the lawyer said.
“The investigators said that if the defense team reads these materials, this might disturb further investigation into the case. This [the investigators’ explanations] has no sense with regard to a statement made by Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka two weeks ago, saying that the investigation was over,” he said.
Plakhotniuk also said that he has sent an official request to the PGO due to the refusal to give him materials of the criminal case in full.
“As soon as the defense team receives a copy of an instruction to refuse to hand over some materials of the case to it, we will appeal against it to court,” he said.
Meanwhile, the PGO’s press service said that on Friday the investigators provided Plakhotniuk with the materials of the criminal case, he read the documents for one hour and then left the Prosecutor General’s Office, explaining this by his tight schedule. According to the PGO, the lawyer scheduled his next visit to the PGO to read the materials of the case for Saturday.
The press service stressed that the volume of the materials provided to the defense team for reading is regulated by Article 221 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine (reading of materials of a pre-trial investigation before its completion).
“This regulation allows the defense team to be provided only with those materials that won’t affect the pre-trial investigation,” the PGO said.
According to the statement, on January 30 another defense lawyer of Tymoshenko, Serhiy Vlasenko, asked the investigator to provide him with the materials of the case under Article 221 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine.
As reported, Yevhen Scherban, a member of the Liberal Party’s executive committee and a parliamentarian, was gunned down while disembarking from a plane at the Donetsk airport on November 3, 1996. The killers fled the scene in a car. Scherban, his wife and a mechanic died from injuries on the spot. The plane’s flight engineer suffered injuries to his neck and later died in a hospital. Law enforcement agencies ruled out a political motive behind the crime.
Scherban’s son, Ruslan Scherban, a member of the Donetsk Regional Council, said at a press conference on April 4, 2012 that he had passed documents indicating to Tymoshenko’s and former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko’s possible involvement in his father’s murder to the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Tymoshenko and Lazarenko have categorically denied being involved in the murder.
On January 18, 2013, Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka said at a briefing that the Prosecutor General’s Office had finished its investigation into the criminal case on the murder of MP Scherban and that Tymoshenko had been notified of being suspected of having organized the crime, along with Lazarenko.
On January 29, Tymoshenko’s defense lawyer Plakhotniuk said that the ex-premier’s defense team had no access to the materials of the criminal case on the murder of Scherban.
