Skull fragments found in Kyiv region are those of murdered Ukrainian journalist Georgy Gongadze, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Oleksandr Medvedko has said.
"The examination is over, [and] we have received a positive answer," Medvedko said at a press conference on Thursday.
Gongadze, the late editor of the Ukrayinska Pravda Web publication, went missing 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, Lesia Gongadze, has refused to have it interred before the head is found.
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’s Pechersky district court decided to remand Pukach, who was charged with being involved with Gongadze murder, in custody.
On July 28, police found a fragment of skull suspected to belong to Gongadze at a site in Bila Tserkva district, Kyiv region, after being given information by Pukach.
The journalist’s wife Myroslava Gongadze insisted that the DNA analysis of the skull fragments be performed abroad, and to suspend the investigators studying the case.
On November 28, 2000, Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz publicized in parliament the tapes that appeared to implicate then President Leonid Kuchma in Gongadze’s murder. The tapes were allegedly recorded by former Presidential Guard Mykola Melnychenko.
International experts carried out a comprehensive phonographic examination of the tapes, but their authenticity has not yet been conclusively proved.
Those who ordered Gongadze’s murder have yet to be identified.
