The Pokrovske District Court in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast handed down jail sentences on June 5 to five men who planned and carried out a fatal acid attack on Kherson anti-corruption activist Kateryna Gandziuk.
The organizers who ordered the attack on Gandziuk, have not yet been prosecuted. The top suspect is Vladyslav Manger, the head of the Kherson Oblast Council.
The court took into consideration the fact that the five men had earlier pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Prosecutors also changed the charges against them from murder to physical assault that caused the death of the victim.
Gandziuk, an outspoken member of the Kherson Oblast Council, died in a hospital in November 2018, three months after she was doused with a liter of sulfuric acid. Before that, she had publicly accused high-ranking local officials of profiting from illegal timber smuggling.
Gandziuk was 33.
Read more: Who Killed Katya Gandziuk?
At the trial on June 5, Kherson native and Donbas war veteran Serhiy Torbin, 42, was identified as the coordinator of the attack.
According to court materials, he met with one of the two organizers, whose names were concealed, around mid-July 2018. They ordered him to either break Gandziuk’s wrists and legs or douse her with acid to “cause her bodily harm for the purpose of intimidation.”
Torbin was sentenced to six years and six months in prison.
To carry out the attack, Torbin recruited four of his acquaintances, also Donbas war veterans. According to earlier reports, Torbin told them Gandziuk needed to be punished because she was “a corrupt official with pro-Russian views who spoke badly about war veterans.”
Mykyta Hrabchuk, 24, who threw acid on Gandziuk, received a six-year prison term.
Two other abettors, Volodymyr Vasyanovych, 25, and Vyacheslav Vyshnevsky, 29, were sentenced to four years each in prison.
Viktor Horbunov, 28, who procured the acid but was not present at the moment of the assault, was sentenced to three years in prison.
The group received a payment of $5,000 for the attack.
According to Ukrainian law, the time they spent in detention will be doubled and counted towards their sentence.
Named a suspect in organizing the attack on Gandziuk, Manger was released from detention on bail of nearly Hr 2.5 million ($93,600) for the time of the investigation. He continues to serve as chairperson of the Kherson Oblast Council.
The middleman who communicated the order to Torbin is suspected to be Oleksiy Levin, a former aide to Mykola Stavytsky, a member of the Kherson Oblast Council and ex-adviser to Manger.
Levin has been put on the wanted list. He is reportedly hiding abroad.
