You're reading: 3 suspects in murder of jeweler in Kyiv arrested for 2 months

Kyiv’s Shevchenkivsky district court has remanded to pretrial custody without bail three persons suspected in the murder of a jeweler.

The press service of Kyiv’s Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO) on Tuesday said last week during special operation police detained three suspects involved in the murder of a jeweler in Kyiv. Two of the suspects are former employees of Ukraine’s SBU State Security Service and National Police of Ukraine. The third has been convicted of other crimes.

The suspects were served notice of suspicion for premeditated murder and planning a murder, Paragraphs 6, 12 of Part 2 of Article 115 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code, Part 1 of Article 14, Paragraphs 1, 5, 12, 13 of Part 2 of Article 115 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code.

As reported, on March 5 on Florentsii Street in Kyiv’s Dniprovsky district, an unknown assailant shot dead a man born in 1960 who parked near a high-rise residential building. The shooter disappeared from the scene of the crime. Serhiy Kyseliov, the former owner of the jewelry factory, was the victim of the shooting.

According to ex-Deputy Prosecutor General David Sakvarelidze, Kyseliov was a witness in the so-called “diamond prosecutors case” and “told how his factory was searched and his diamonds disappeared during a search ordered by Oleksandr Korniyets. Kyseliov also claimed several million dollars and a dozen kilograms of gold went missing. In his testimony, he mentioned the names of the former Deputy Prosecutor General and Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs. He also said that in return for “forgetting” about the gold and valuables stolen during the raid, the case would be closed. It was closed,” Sakvarelidze said.

Member of Parliament Anton Gerashchenko (the People’s Front Party faction) also said Kyseliov was the “main witness in the diamond prosecutors case.” He added, however, that the murder cannot be connected with the case, saying Kyseliov could have been murdered because of debts or personal conflict.

Korniyets, meanwhile, said Kyseliov was not a witness in the case against him, but did seek the return of semiprecious and precious stones taken from him in 2010. He said the stones weighed a few hundred kilograms. “It was his appeal that the PGO turned down, and then Kyiv’s Pechersky district court ordered the case to be entered into the unified register of pretrial investigations, which was done,” he said.