The editor and founder of the news website Ukrayinska Pravda, Olena Prytula, has written to Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, asking him that the murder of the journalist Pavel Sheremet be investigated as a terrorist attack.
In a statement published on the UP website on February 27, Prytula said that the murderers’ intention was not just to kill Sheremet but to also achieve a psychological effect, in the form of panic, by staging a terror attack in a public place.
“Terrorists’ obvious goal is to intimidate journalists because Pavel was a well-known journalist in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. His criticism of the Belarusian government caused him to lose Belarusian citizenship. In Ukraine, Sheremet produced insightful news reports for Ukrayinska Pravda and Radio Vesti,” the statement said.
There has been no result after 20 months of preliminary inquiry into Sheremet’s murder, Prytula said.
She asked Lutsenko to urgently submit relevant data with the national register of pre-trial investigations and start an inquiry into “a terror attack resulting in the death of a human” (Article 258 part three of the Ukrainian Criminal Code). Prytula also asked to be recognized as a victim in the case.
It was reported that Sheremet was fatally injured in a car explosion while traveling in Prytula’s vehicle in central Kyiv on July 20, 2016. Inquiries mainly focused on Sheremet’s journalistic activities in Ukraine and other countries.
Prosecutors qualified the murder as being premeditated and committed in a way which posed danger to multiple lives (Article 115(5)(2) of the Ukrainian Criminal Code).
As of late 2017, there was no progress in the murder inquiry.
