Ukraine’s new Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has promised to take personal control over the long-running investigation into the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, and report on his findings in July.
Lutsenko,
who was appointed as the nation’s top prosecutor on May 12, said at a press
briefing on May 30 at the Prosecutor’s General Office of Ukraine that he had
already made progress on the case in which ex-President Leonid Kuchma is the top suspect. Kuchma has always denied complicity.
A
similar promise was made by many of Lutsenko’s predecessors, including Viktor Shokin.
Gongadze
was kidnapped and murdered on Sept. 16, 2000. Four officers from the Interior
Ministry’s foreign surveillance department and criminal intelligence unit,
including its chief, Oleksiy Pukach, have since been convicted of the
journalist’s murder. However, the investigations in the case have not revealed who ordered the murder although the trail went to Kuchma and his top subordinates..
Two months after the murder, one of Kuchma’s personal bodyguards, Mykola Melnychenko, released the tapes that he said were the recorded phone calls of Kuchma ordering to “tackle with Gongadze.”
In 2013, a Ukrainian court refused to recognize the tapes as evidence.
Gongadze’s
body, which his late mother Lesya Gongadze had long refused bury, was finally buried on March 22.
“I’ve already had some success in the Gongadze case,”
Lutsenko told journalists.“I want to note that (as interior minister from 2007-2010), I
helped the Security Service to arrest Pukach and passed the cases of four
others connected to Gongadze’s murder to the Prosecutor General’s Office.”
In 2013, a court ruled that Yuriy Kravchenko, the former
interior minister and superior of the four officers convicted of the killing, was
one of the organizers of Gongadze’s murder. Kravchenko was found dead in 2005,
on the day he was supposed to be questioned in Gongadze’s case. Claims that Kravchenko
committed suicide have been cast in doubt by several media reports that he was
shot twice in the head.
Lutsenko said that as prosecutor general he would request to
see the latest testimony from Pukach and would bring the investigation to a
final conclusion.
In December 2015, Pukach, who was sentenced to life in prison
in 2013, changed his testimony and asked that his sentence be
reduced to 15 years, according to Ukrainian news website Liga.net.
Pukach said that journalist’s murder should be considered unintentional manslaughter. He claimed
that Kravchenko ordered him and the other officers just to scare the journalist.
However, Gongadze died after one of the officers hit him, Pukach claimed.
According to Ukrainska Pravda, in January 2016 the Court of
Appeal upheld Pukach’s life sentence and refused to satisfy his appeal to cut
his prison term to 15 years.
Valentyna Telychenko, Myroslava Gongadze’s lawyer, who Lutsenko
appointed deputy prosecutor general, told the Kyiv Post that from now on she is
unable to reveal any details of the ongoing investigation.
“The last court session was so long ago. Right now I know only
as much as everybody else about the case. Let the prosecutor general do his job
and wait until next month, when the investigation team will present its
report,” Telychenko told the Kyiv Post on June 1.
Gongadze, the founder of the online newspaper Ukrainska
Pravda, was kidnapped and murdered on Sept. 16, 2000. His decapitated body
was discovered on Nov. 2 in a forest in Kyiv Oblast.
Kyiv Post staff writer Veronika Melkozerova
can be reached at [email protected]
