You're reading: Gongadze disclosures raise fears anew of cover-up by authorities

A recent court decision could seal Ukraine’s most notorious journalist murder case without having those suspected of ordering the killing face justice.

The investigation of one of Ukraine’s most notorious crimes – the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze on Sept. 16, 2000 – took a new twist this week.

A Kyiv court on Jan. 31 upheld the prosecutor’s decision to alter the charge against Gongadze’s alleged killer, Oleksiy Pukach, from carrying out a “contract murder” to following a “criminal order.”

Valentyna Telychenko, a lawyer for Gongadze’s widow, has appealed the change, fearing that it could “end all lines of investigation” involving former Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, Pukach’s former supervisor.

Kravchenko died from two gunshot wounds to the head on March 4, 2005, in a death ruled a suicide. Prosecutors accuse him of ordering the murder. Prosecutors said the description of charges against Pukach “cannot be considered final.”

Critics for years have accused Ukraine’s top officials, including ex-President Leonid Kuchma and his then chief of staff Volodymyr Lytvyn, now the speaker of parliament, of ordering the murder. Both have consistently denied involvement.

Prosecutors also mysteriously accuse “people whose identities haven’t been determined by the investigation” of having ordered the murder along with Kravchenko.

Ex-Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko (L), killed by two gunshot wounds to the head in 2005, and former Interior Ministry Gen. Oleksiy Pukach.

Tetiana Kravchenko, widow of the ex-interior minister, claims her husband didn’t have any motive for killing the journalist.

Telychenko questioned why the investigation identifies Kravchenko but doesn’t name other suspects.

“The investigator’s conclusion on Kravchenko’s guilt was based on Pukach’s evidence, but Pukach then mentions the other names. Why does the investigation consider those people not to have been determined?” she said.

Telychenko told the Kyiv Post that in September she reviewed testimony given by Pukach. That review, she said, implicated Kuchma, Lytvyn as well as Leonid Derkach, ex-head of Ukraine’s security service, and Eduard Fere, a high-ranking interior ministry official under Kuchma.

Voices resembling those of Kuchma and Lytvyn are heard discussing what to do with Gongadze on recordings allegedly made by Mykola Melnychenko, Kuchma’s ex-bodyguard. The authenticity of the tapes is in dispute.

“The withdrawal of the ‘contract murder’ from the Pukach accusations was an attempt to avoid implicating Kuchma in this case,” Oleksandr Zhyr, a former lawmaker who headed parliament’s investigation into the Melnychenko tapes, said.

Oleg Musienko, a former lawyer for Pukach, claimed last October that Pukach’s testimony proved the guilt of Kuchma and Lytvyn. Since then, he has retracted this claim, citing other evidence showing that Kravchenko, Kuchma, Lytvyn and others mentioned by Pukach are not guilty, but that someone else ordered the killing. He refused to provide the evidence to the Kyiv Post.

The Gongadze murder has always been politically charged. General Prosecutor Viktor Pshonka said earlier that Gongadze was killed over his “professional and public activity” as a journalist.

Gongadze, who founded the Internet news website Ukrainska Pravda, was frequently critical of Kuchma and other officials.

Both Kuchma’s successor as president, Viktor Yushchenko, and President Viktor Yanukovych, pledged to make solving the case a priority.

Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister who now leads the opposition to Yanukovych, has accused the president of taking part in the cover-up of the investigation to protect Kuchma and Lytvyn, whom she believes ordered Gongadze’s murder.

Telychenko said she believed prosecutors were acting on orders to send Pukach’s case to court without fully investigating who ordered the murder.

Telychenko said she would appeal the court decision changing the charges against Pukach. If the court again rules against her, she said she would take the case to Europe.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].