International media watchdog, colleagues question official theory that Ukrainian News director Mykhailo Kolomiyets committed suicide
Mykhailo Kolomiyets , the director of local news agency Ukrainian News who went missing in late October , has been founf dead in Belarus, Ukrainian and Belarusian authorities say.
In a bizarre case that seems sure to refocus attention on Ukraine’s heavily scrutinized free-press record, Ko- lomiyets’ body was found hanging from a tree in a Belarusian forest on Oct. 30, a Ukrainian law enforcement official said. Local authorities in the town of Molodechno, some 80 kilometers northwest of Minsk, called the death a suicide but were unable to identify the body and buried it on Nov. 11.
Days later the local authorities, apparently tipped off by Ukrainian officers who had traced Kolomiyets’ whereabouts to Molodechno, dug up the body and realized it probably belonged to Kolomiyets.
Or at least that’s what Ukrainian officials are saying. Details of the case remain hazy at best. The only Ukrainian official who has commented publicly on the case, Internal Affairs Ministry Deputy State Secretary Mykhailo Korniyenko, indicated Nov. 19 that his office was going under the assumption that the death was indeed a suicide.
“The autopsy showed that there weren’t any traces of violence or self-defense. So it’s a suicide,” Korniyenko said.
Korniyenko based that assessment on the analyses of the Belarusians prior to the initial burial. Ukrainian forensic experts have yet to examine the body.
Korniyenko said that Belarusian and Ukrainian police will continue the investigation jointly.
While skeptics cautioned against believing either Belarusian or Ukrainians authorities on any aspect of the case, Kolomiyets’ agency, Ukrainian News, reported Nov. 20 that the journalist’s mother and acquaintances traveled to Belarus and identified the body on Nov. 20.
The report cited a police officer at the local police department in Molodechno.
Belarusian Interior Ministry spokesman Dmitry Parton said that police had established that Kolomiyets had stayed in a hotel for an undisclosed number of days before the body near Molodechno was discovered on Oct. 30. He said that employees of the hotel had identified Kolomiyets.
Kolomiyets was last seen by acquaintances in Ukraine on Oct. 21. Ukrainian police said they confirmed that Kolomiyets arrived in Minsk on Oct. 23, two days after he disappeared, and phoned a friend in Kyiv on Oct. 28.
Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based media watchdog, is among several organizations and individuals that have cast doubt on the claim that Kolomiyets’ death was a suicide.
In an official statement the organization called on Prosecutor General Svyatoslav Pyskun to personally oversee the case and offered to send a French pathologist for assistance in examining the body.
The group also asked Pyskun to take into account contradictions in evidence it had gathered and not to rule out the possibility of a contract killing.
Reporters Without Borders noted that, when calling his friends from Belarus, Kolomiyets never said that he intended to commit suicide or that he was depressed.
The group also said his mother denied police statements that she had been in regular contact with her son since he disappeared.
Friends and co-workers said they believed that Kolomiyets was a well-balanced, strong-willed individual with no reason to commit suicide.
In a Nov. 20 statement, Ukrainian News employees questioned why police had rushed to pass Kolomiyets’ death off as a suicide despite the lack of clear facts and confusion surrounding the case.
The journalists also requested that the conclusions of Belarusian forensic experts be checked in Ukraine.
“We find it difficult to understand the motives of the Belarusian law-enforcement bodies, who buried Kolomiyets’ body as unidentified 12 days after Ukrainian authorities appealed for assistance in the search for him,” the statement read.
Kolomiyets created Ukrainian News in 1997 and owned half its shares.
