Prosecutor General of Ukraine Oleksandr Medvedko has claimed again that there is only one suspect in the case of the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze - Oleksiy Pukach, the former chief of the main criminal investigation department at the ministry's foreign surveillance unit.
"Pukach is under arrest and charged with being involved with Gongadze’s murder," Medvedko said at a press conference on Thursday, July 22.
At the same time Prosecutor General did not name the high-ranking officials that Pukach has said were also involved with this murder.
"Let’s wait until the end of the investigation, I’ll not say who he named," Medvedko said.
"We’re not hiding [names] – when we come to the end [of the investigation] we will certainly say that we have one person or several ones [involved with this crime]. We will of course say when the pretrial investigation into Pukach or other persons has been completed and when their acquaintance with the materials relating to the case has started," he said.
The Prosecutor General also said again that the investigation into this case would be completed by August.
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.
As reported, 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 in May 2010 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.
Those who ordered Gongadze’s murder have yet to be identified.
