The main department for the investigation of especially important cases at the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine has completed the investigation into the criminal case against the former external surveillance chief at Ukraine's Interior Ministry, Oleksiy Pukach, the press service of the Prosecutor's General Office has reported.
"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," reads a report.
In addition, Pukach is accused of abuse of power and an assault ordered on member of Kyiv Public Human Rights Union "We", Oleksiy Podolsky, as well as destroying service documents of the department for operative service at the Interior Ministry that included important information for the investigation about the persons that participated in the illegal surveillance of Georgy Gongadze.
Earlier, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka said the case on the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze was to be sent to court in January 2011.
"All materials on the completion of the investigation into the Gongadze case are to be submitted no later than December 7," the prosecutor general said.
Journalist 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.
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 Outdoor Surveillance and Criminal Intelligence Department, Col. Valeriy Kostenko, Col. Mykola Protasov, and Maj. Oleksandr Popovych, were found guilty of killing Gongadze. Pukach, another suspect in the case, was detained in the Zhytomyr region on July 21, 2009.
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.
The Prosecutor General’s Office reported on September 14, 2010, that the pre-trial investigation into 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.
At the begging of October, the Prosecutor General’s Office officially confirmed the replacement of the head of the investigative group in charge of Pukach case. The head of the investigative group, Oleksandr Kharchenko, was replaced with the investigator of cases of particular importance, Vladyslav Hryschenko. The investigation into this case has been resumed.
