A key suspect in the 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze has turned up in Zhytomyr Oblast, ending five years as one of the nation’s most-wanted fugitives.
The suspect, Oleksiy Pukach, is cooperating with the investigation, according Vasyl Hrytsak, deputy head of the State Security Service, who is in charge of the investigation. He said Pukach named those who ordered the murder. He said Pukach also confessed to strangling the journalist and promised to say where where the late journalist’s missing head is buried.
Hrytsak said there were “high-ranking officials” among those named. He declined to elaborate, but promised “a lot more interesting information” later on.
Myroslava Gongadze, the journalist’s widow, told the Kyiv Post that former president Leonid Kuchma should be worried about the capture of the main suspect in the case.
“Former president Kuchma has reason to be afraid. The head of his administration, Volodymyr Lytvyn, has reason to be afraid. Many ranks within the Interior Ministry have to be afraid. Because this was a serious, great camapign,” she said. “Georgiy’s murder was just one of the crimes committed by President Kuchma regime. And if Pukach really tells everything he knows, I think we can expect great discoveries.”
Victor Yushchenko said he is concerned about the safety if the witness. “I gave an order yesterday to make sure not a single hair falls off Pukach’s head, that he should be on a territory where every second the security of his life is being controlled,” he told Silski Visti newspaper. Pukach’s whereabouts are currently kept secret.
Earlier, other politicians, including Oleksandr Turchynov, the nation’s first deputy premier, called on investigators to protect Pukach from harm. “Many influential people are not interested in the answer to the question of who ordered [the murder] getting to court,” Turchynov said.
Verkhovna Rada deputy Gennadiy Moskal implied that Pukach was easy to find – just that the will to find him was missing until now.
“Former colleagues who have retired during meetings often told me that Oleksiy [Pukach] called them and asked how things are. He never really hid. It’s simply that nobody was looking for him,” Moskal said. “Pukach has a mass of passports. He worked in the service where cover-up documents are issued. But, in the end, as soon as he realized nobody’s looking for him, he quietly lived in the country, ate everything fresh, shepherded cows and cared nothing for those who searched for him.”
Kuchma, on audiotapes made by former presidential bodyguard Mykola Melnychenko, is allegedly heard discussing the need to silence Gongadze for his online news reports about high-level corruption. Not only Kuchma, but current Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn and other top-level administration officials are reportedly heard on the Melnychenko tapes plotting against Gongadze.
Kuchma and other politicians implicated in the murder have consistently denied any involvement. The authenticity of the Melnychenko tapes, released by Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz in November 2000, is disputed and has never been conclusively proved.
In videotaped testimony in 2000, Melnychenko – who in recent years has been living in Ukraine and the United States – accused Kuchma of ordering the disappearance of Gongadze. Melnychenko said Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko directed a special department within the ministry to kidnap Gongadze at the instruction of the president.
The investigation into the Gongadze’s murder before Kuchma left office in 2005 quickly degenerated into farce. It was characterized by stonewalling, misleading statements and outright lies, fueling suspicions of an official cover-up.
Solving the Gongadze case – and other high-profile crimes allegedly captured by the Melnychenko tapes – were among the driving forces of the 2004 democratic Orange Revolution. But President Victor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko have never made good on their promises to solve most of these cases.
On the most recent anniversary of Gongadze’s Sept. 16, 2000, disappearance, the nation’s human rights ombudsman, Nina Karpacheva, blasted the ongoing lack of progress in solving the case. “It seems to me that [the Prosecutor General’s Office] lacks the courage, professionalism or independence to name those who ordered this murder,” Karpacheva said “Until the head of Georgiy Gongadze is found, Ukraine will remain the ‘headless rider.’”
Pukach wasindicted for the slaying in absentia in 2005, his arrest was the result of a joint operation between the Prosecutor General’s Office and Interior Ministry. According to SBU’s Hrytsak, he never left Ukraine and lived in Luhansk, Kharkiv, Kyiv and Zhytomyr regions since 2003. Apparently, he expected to be arrested, Hrytsak said.
Lower-level Interior Ministry police officers Mykola Protasov, Valeriy Kostenko and Oleksandr Popovych have been convicted of abducting Gongadze in Kyiv. Gongadze, founder of the muckraking Ukrainski Pravda news website, reportedly angered Kuchma and other high-ranking members of the administration with his willing to report in detail on corruption.
During a trial, the three convicted police officers claimed they were only following orders from Interior Ministry police general Oleksiy Pukach, who suspected of strangling Gongadze himself. Pukach was a key aide to then-Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko.
Kravchenko died of two gunshots to the head on March 4, 2005, just hours before he was to begin providing testimony as a witness in the case. The official ruling of suicide is doubted. Media reports surfaced that Kravchenko was under surveillance in the days before his death and that his body was found with two broken fingers and other injuries.
Kravchenko left this alleged suicide note: “My dear ones, I am not guilty of anything. Forgive me, for I became a victim of the political intrigues of President Kuchma and his entourage. I am leaving you with a clear conscious, farewell.” Suicide or not, Kravchenko’s death exposed law enforcement officials’ inability to protect key witnesses to the nation’s greatest crimes.
Gongadze’s decapitated body was found in the suburbs of the Ukrainian capital in November 2000.
Pukach was first detained in the fall of 2003 on suspicion of destroying documents proving that Gongadze had been shadowed by police. Pukach was later released under a written pledge not to leave town, but disappeared soon afterwards.
The official investigation theory is that Pukach sanctioned the surveillance of Gongadze and led the convicted group of officers in kidnapping Gongadze and taking him out to a field near the village of Sukholisy in the Bila Tserkva district of Kyiv Oblast.
According to investigation findings, after strangling Gongadze, Pukach ordered the other policemen to keep silent about the crime. Pukach might also have reburied Gongadze’s body in a forest in the Tarashcha district.
But strong suspicions – fueled by the Melnychenko tapes — remain that Pukach acted on instructions either from Kuchma or high-ranking members of the presidential administration. He may have even been rewarded for the crime with the gift in August 2003 of a new three-room apartment in an elite housing complex in Kyiv.
The press service of former Verkhovna Rada Speaker Oleksandr Moroz, who released the Melnychenko tapes in 2000, released this statement: “Detaining Pukach is an important step to establish justice…it’s important for investigators to find out more about Gongadze’s reburial, the way his body was transported and everything connected with the dismemberment, including information taped in Leonid Kuchma’s office already decoded abroad, it will be easier to answer questions about those who ordered and organized the murder and the motive behind the crime overall.
More on Gongadze case from the KP archives:
Gongadze bombshell: SBU officer’s testimony claims Kuchma ordered journalist’s disappearance.
Prsecutor completes examination of Melnychenko’s tapes in Gongadze tapes abroad.
Key segment of new Melnychenko tapes transcribed by the Kyiv Post.
