A recent assassination and a spate of other suspicious incidents suggest that the private STB television channel has acquired powerful enemies.
Oleksandr Deineko, a former head of the Interior Ministry's Organized Crime Department who had close links with STB, was killed near his house on Feb. 23.
Deineko left his job in the Interior Ministry over a year ago, and since then reportedly worked in private security and television.
Deineko worked as an adviser to STB's director, Mykola Knyazhytsky, in October-November 1998, when Knyazhytsky was president of state broadcasting company Ukrteleradio.
A well-informed television industry source said Deineko was head of security at STB before his death. However, Knyazhytsky said Deineko wasn't employed by STB and downplayed any connection between the murder and the channel.
Knyazhytsky suggested the murder could be connected to a corruption probe he launched as Ukrteleradio head, which he has said led to his dismissal from that post.
'It's painful to think that a person who had been my adviser on [state TV channel] UT-1 was killed,' Knyazhytsky said.
Myroslava Mayerchuk, STB's director of news programs, also denied that Deineko was working for STB, but reported a number of other incidents in which STB officials or journalists were targeted.
She said she had asked journalists to stay off the streets late at night and not to let strangers into their homes after a recent attack on STB's commercial director and an apparent arson attempt on Knyazhytsky's apartment.
Deineko was found dead at around 11 p.m. on Feb. 23 after an unknown killer shot him several times near his home on Prospekt Peremohy and then disappeared. According to media reports, the murderer waited for his victim at the doorsteps and then shot him from a close distance.
Ivan Hoshovsky, a prosecutor in Kyiv's Radnyansky district, said he was working on several possible explanations for the killing. He said that releasing any further information could harm the investigation.
Knyazhytsky said that after leaving his job as adviser to Knyazhytsky at Ukrteleradio Deineko initiated a parliamentary inquiry into UT-1's financial management.
According to Knyazhytsky, Deineko presented parliament deputies with hundreds of pages of documents proving illegal commercial activities at the channel and corruption among its top managers.
Knyazhytsky said Deineko's death could be connected with that inquiry, but declined to elaborate.
Knyazhytsky also acknowledged that Deineko was a personal friend of Volodymyr Sivkovich, a top manager of STB. Sivkovich could not be reached for comment.
Althought few people in the TV industry and political circles said they had heard about Deineko's killing, parliamentary deputy Hryhory Omelchenko said he and his colleague Anatoly Yermak had sent an enquiry on the status of the case to Prosecutor General Mykhailo Potebenko. Omelchenko said he would not comment on the case until he gets an answer from the prosecutor.
Yermak and Omelchenko are both independent deputies and sit on parliament's anti-corruption committee.
Meanwhile, there were more attacks on people connected to STB.
Mayerchuk said that on the night of March 2, STB's commercial director, Dmytro Dakhno, was attacked and beaten in his own apartment by three masked men.
According to Mayerchuk, he opened the door to a man who said he was an electrician and that there had been problems with power in the building.
Mayerchuk said Dakhno described the three attackers as 'looking like military men'. She said they told Dakhno that they would let him live for now but would kill him next time.
On March 1, she said, Knyazhytsky's ground floor apartment was almost set on fire when empty property next to it burned down after a short circuit. She said Knyazhytsky and his family had also received phone threats to their lives.
Knyazhystsky didn't mention any phone threats or fire when interviewed and couldn't be reached for further comment.
Mayerchuk added that on Feb. 26 an STB journalist inexplicably lost consciousness while standing on a train platform in Lviv and woke up two or three hours later at a remote train station in the Lviv region. STB assumed it was an attack and reported it to Lviv police, she said.
Mayerchuk said she personally has been followed since October. She said two or three people constantly watch her apartment and follow her car.
But Mayerchuk said she wasn't sure who was behind the incidents.
'It could be [a reaction] to our own journalistic investigations, or it could be the participation [of Knyazhytsky and Deineko] in the UT investigation,' she said.
STB has a number of programs aimed at uncovering corruption and illegal business. An STB employee said that ine such program, Sektor Tini ('The Shadow Sector'), recently received an angry letter from the Ukrainian Credit Bank complaining that a program on the metals industry had damaged its reputation. The bank is part of Hryhory Surkis' and Viktor Medvedchuk's Slavutych financial-industrial group.
Although Knyazhytsky would give no examples of the corruption exposed by Deineko at UT-1, in previous statements to reporters Knyazhytsky pointed to the Gravis TV company's contract to produce the Same Toi talk show. Gravis is controlled by Oleksandr Volkov, a close friend and former aid of President Leonid Kuchma.
Also, STB's Sivkovich, who worked in the presidential administration last year, has since been uncommonly outspoken about the workings of the energy industry. He was a primary source for a Financial Times story on the subject last December.
