With Ukrainian officials continuing to make no progress in solving the likely murder of Gongadze, Russian and American private investigators are lobbying to get involved in the investigation
With Ukrainian officials continuing to make no progress in solving the likely murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze,
Russian and American private investigators are lobbying to get involved in the investigation.
If they can’t solve the crime, U.S. forensic specialists from the Federal Bureau of Investigations possibly could – if American diplomats say it’s OK, that is.
A Russian scriptwriter is among those who thinks he can find the killer of Gongadze, who vanished mysteriously in the center of Kyiv last September.
“I am sure that this case can be finally solved and the people who committed this crime will face a court,” said Andrey Konstantinov, who directs the Agency for Investigative Journalism (AZHUR), on March 26. “While we might not be able to track down the people who ordered the murder, it’s definitely possible to find the people who carried it out.”
AZHUR is based in St. Petersburg but, mysteriously, involves several Ukrainian political heavyweights, all close allies of President Leonid Kuchma.
Konstantinov himself moonlights as a scriptwriter for the popular Russian detective series “Criminal Petersburg.” He claims that AZHUR’s investigation was mostly based on the records of mobile and home phone calls made by Gongadze’s closest friends and colleagues. He would not specify how his employees obtained the records, which are considered confidential and not subject to disclosure without the caller’s permission.
“It’s not hard to find connections in the telephone companies. Operators shared the information with us out of good will,” explained Konstantinov, adding that his helpers had learned that someone called from Tarashcha – the small village where the headless body alleged to be Gongadze’s was found buried last November – to the offices of Ukrainska Pravda, Gongadze’s Internet site, in mid-November.
Another call from Tarashcha to the Czech Republic was recorded on the day that Mykola Melnychenko – the former security guard who secretly taped President Leonid Kuchma – received a Czech visa.
The calls are more than just coincidence, according to Konstantinov, who learned that Melnychenko had allowed Gongadze to listen to the now-notorious audio records of conversations between Kuchma and top aides and had warned Gongadze that he might be kidnapped.
Konstantinov refused to name the source of the sensational revelations until AZHUR completed its investigation, which was facilitated by former Prime Minister Valery Pustovoitenko, one of Kuchma’s closest chums and a self-confessed fan of Konstantinov’s fiction.
“We did our best to create normal work conditions for AZHUR’s investigation,” Pustovoitenko said, without citing specifics. He declined to answer the burning question of how he ended up on the AZHUR team in the first place.
Not to be outdone, another politician loyal to Kuchma, parliament deputy Serhy Tyhypko, announced March 23 that his Labor Ukraine party had contracted with U.S. private detective agency Kroll Associates to assist in determining the cause of death of Gongadze’s supposed corpse.
Tyhypko said the deal was sealed after he floated the idea past U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual and received Kuchma’s approval.
The U.S. Embassy spokesman acknowledged on March 28 that Pascual had indeed met with Tyhypko, but said the ambassador had expressed no reaction to the initiative.
Under the arrangement, Kroll will provide information to Labor Ukraine based on information gathered by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies.
Kroll director Michael Cherkassky said six to 12 sleuths, including the head of its New York department, would travel to Ukraine for the investigation, which would take several months.
“For now, we are looking for an office,” Cherkassky said, adding that Kroll had conducted similar investigations in other countries.
If AZHUR or Kroll fail, the FBI may step in, at least according to an anonymous diplomatic source in Washington, who on March 27 told Reuters that Ukraine had re-invited FBI forensic specialists to Kyiv to collect additional blood and tissue samples from the headless corpse for DNA analysis.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Anatoly Zlenko, who visited Washington on March 27, hand delivered to the U.S. State Department a letter from Potebenko to FBI Director Louis Freeh.
“We have received another official request from the Government of Ukraine for assistance in the investigation of the Tarashcha corpse and have taken it under consideration,” confirmed the U.S. embassy spokesman in Kyiv on March 28.
Gongadze’s mother, Lesya, has refused to cooperate further with Ukrainian investigators because of several earlier missteps in the corpse probe. But she has said she would contribute a DNA sample and provide some X-rays of her son under the following conditions: Foreigners must supervise any comparison between the X-rays she provides and the X-rays of the corpse; and investigators must offer an assurance that they will look into the cause and time of death.
Acting on an earlier request filed under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between Ukraine and the United States, two FBI agents were in Kyiv from March 5 through March 8 to collect samples for DNA testing.
They were able to gather some DNA samples as set forth in the agreement between the FBI and the Ukrainian General Prosecutor’s Office, but said further samples would be necessary to undertake the analysis.
Earlier, Russian forensic experts contracted by Ukrainian prosecutors found that DNA from the corpse matched DNA of Lesya Gongadze.
But German forensic tests contracted by a parliament committee looking into the case found that tissue allegedly taken from the corpse back in September could not have been Gongadze’s.
