The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine has fulfilled all of the requirements of the Criminal Procedure Code in terms of giving the injured party in the case of the killing of journalist Georgy Gongadze the chance to examine case materials regarding charges brought against Oleksiy Pukach, the former chief of the external surveillance department at the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, the press service of the Prosecutor General's Office has reported.
The press service told Interfax-Ukraine on Wednesday, December 8, that Valentyna Telychenko, the lawyer for Myroslava Gongadze, the widow of journalist Georgy Gongadze, had been notified about the possibility to study the case. However, she had not responded in time, and therefore the case materials had been submitted for examination by Pukach.
The press service said that the injured party could examine the materials during the trial.
As reported, Valentyna Telychenko, the lawyer for Myroslava Gongadze, the widow of journalist Georgy Gongadze, said earlier that the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine was preventing the injured party in the Gongadze case from examining materials on a case regarding charges brought against Pukach, in order to ensure that there were no complaints about the course of the investigation.
Telychenko said that last Saturday, on December 4, she received a document from the Prosecutor General’s Office that from Friday, December 3, she could study the case.
"But today [on December 7] I learned that I have no chance to examine the materials, because the materials of the case are currently being examined by Pukach," she said.
Telychenko noted that she insisted on the simultaneous examination of the case, but she had been denied. She said that the prosecutor’s office told her that she could study the case during the trial.
"There are motives behind the failure to submit the materials for examination… There are so many doubts over the pre-trial investigation," the lawyer said.
The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine said on December 6 that it had completed the investigation into the criminal case against the former external surveillance chief at Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, Oleksiy Pukach.
"The pre-trial investigation established that on the night from September 16 to September 17, 2000, Oleksiy Pukach, under the instructions of Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko and other officials, [and] in preliminary agreement with a group of persons, committed the premeditated murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze, because the victim was fulfilling public and journalistic duties," the prosecutor’s office said.
Gongadze disappeared in Kyiv on September 16, 2000. In November 2000 a decapitated body was found in the woods near Kyiv, which experts concluded might have been journalist’s. The body remains unburied, as the journalist’s mother, Lesia Gongadze, has refused to have it interred before the head is found.
In May 2010, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Oleksandr Medvedko said that the remains of a skull found in the Kyiv region in July 2009 were those of Gongadze.
In 2008, three former officers from the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s outdoor surveillance and criminal intelligence department, Col. Valeriy Kostenko, Col. Mykola Protasov, and Maj. Oleksandr Popovych, were found guilty of killing Gongadze.
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 in July 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.
