“Killing Pavel,” a documentary investigating the murder of Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet killed in a car blast in Kyiv in 2016, received a prestigious DIG award 2018 in Italy on June 2.
The film produced by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the Kyiv Post partner, and Slidstvo.Info, received a top award in Investigative Long section.
“When about a month ago we received a notice that we had reached the final, we were very happy. But the two very strong teams also reached the final — Al Jazeera and France 2. So we, of course, had doubts that we would win,” said Anna Babinets, one of five journalists involved in the documentary investigation and a former Kyiv Post staff writer.
Vlad Lavrov, a Kyiv Post journalist, was also among five journalists that received the award.
In this film, released in 2017, the journalists examined the CCTV cameras located near the place of the crime and managed to identify a man and a woman, who had laid an explosive device under the journalist’s car on the eve of his killing.
They also managed to identify the two cars being parked overnight by the house of Sheremet and find out that a man sitting in one of them was an officer of Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU). The SBU later reported that man was their former officer but claimed they questioned him on this issue.
In April, this documentary also was chosen for a prestigious Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, putting behind the well-known global media. The journalists will receive the award on June 16 in Orlando, the United States, Babinets said.
Meanwhile, the official investigation of the Sheremet’s killing, which occurred almost two years ago, remains stalled, sparking the criticism that the law enforcement agencies are not putting enough efforts for investigation.
The SBU deputy chief Viktor Kononenko reported in April that the investigators are “lacking the evidence.”
