Journalist organizations have called on the Prosecutor General's Office to carry out a proper investigation into those who ordered the killing of journalist Georgy Gongadze, rather than make accusations against Oleksiy Pukach, the former chief of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry's foreign surveillance department.
This is stipulated in a report on investigating the Gongadze case,
which was drafted with the assistance of the International Federation
of Journalists, the Institute of Mass Information, the National Union
of Journalists of the UK and Ireland, and the Gongadze Foundation.
While announcing the conclusions of the report, which was dedicated
to the ninth anniversary of Gongadze’s death, Executive Director of the
Institute of Mass Information Viktoria Siumar said that the Ukrainian
authorities, by arresting Pukach, had “already managed to report the
arrest of the murder’s organizer.”
Siumar said that in their report, journalist organizations had
called on the Prosecutor General’s Office to “plan ways of building on
Pukach’s arrest in investigating the instigators of Gongadze’s murder,
and to provide as much information as possible publicly on these
plans.” The report also stressed the need to “coordinate the sending of
Pukach to court with the investigation into those who carried out the
murder; not to send a case against Pukach alone to court, so long as
opportunities exist to widen the case against the instigators.
The journalists also called on the Ukrainian president and the
government to “call on the general prosecutor to pursue more vigorously
the instigators of the murder, and give him the necessary support to do
so.”
As reported, journalist Georgy Gongadze went missing in Kyiv on
September 16, 2000. In November 2000, a decapitated body believed,
according to experts, to be that of the journalist, was found in a
forest in Kyiv region.
The body has yet to be interred, as the journalist’s mother, Lesia Gongadze, refuses to bury her son without his head.
In 2008, three former officials of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s
foreign surveillance department and criminal intelligence unit –
colonels Valeriy Kostenko, Mykola Protasov, and major Oleksandr
Popovych, were found guilty of killing the journalist and sentenced to
12 (Kostenko and Popovych) and 13 (Protasov) years in prison.
Pukach, the former chief of the main criminal investigation
department at the ministry’s foreign surveillance unit, was long on the
wanted list, and arrested in Zhytomyr region on July 21, 2009, as a
result of a joint operation by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU)
and the Prosecutor General’s Office. However, it remains unclear who
ordered the murder.
On July 23, Kyiv’s Pechersky district court decided to remand
Pukach, who is charged with being involved with Gongadze murder, in
custody for two months.
Police found a fragment of skull that may belong to Gongadze at a
site in Bila Tserkva district, Kyiv region, after being given
information by Pukach.
The journalist’s wife Myroslava Gongadze insisted that the DNA
analysis of the skull fragments be performed abroad, and to suspend the
investigators studying the case. However, the Prosecutor General’s
Office decided not to change the investigators.
