An ex-SBU state security service officer and another man spent hours in a parked car at night on Ivana Franka Street as a bomb was planted 120 meters away under the car of Pavel Sheremet, a Belarusian-Ukrainian journalist killed when the explosive detonated as he drove to work on the morning of July 20.
This and other revelations came in a 50-minute documentary called “Killing Pavel,” released on May 10.
The documentary prompted the Security Service of Ukraine, the powerful and secretive law enforcement agency controlled by President Petro Poroshenko, to scramble.
The agency, known as the SBU, issued a hasty statement confirming that Ihor Ustymenko, identified as being at the crime scene, worked for the agency. The SBU said Ustymenko got fired in April 2014, but that claim could not be verified. Also, law enforcement agencies said they will investigate the new findings in “Killing Pavel.”
Journalists from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a Kyiv Post partner, and Slidtsvo.info spent nine months investigating the crime. Their findings raise the possibility of a state-sanctioned assassination of the prominent 44-year-old journalist, who worked as a radio show host and who wrote for Ukrainska Pravda, one of the nation’s leading news sites.
In the documentary, Ukrainska Pravda editor-in-chief Sevgil Musayeva-Borovik said that the organization had received warnings that its journalists were under surveillance — warnings that came with excerpts of private communications among staff members about unpublished investigations involving state officials.
Sheremet’s assassination and the lack of progress in the official investigation after more than 10 months raise suspicions that top officials are guilty of obstruction, indifference or simply incompetence in the investigation.
The documentary found that police missed clues, overlooked evidence and failed to track down key witnesses, including Ustymenko.
When journalists found Ustymenko, he gave implausible and evasive explanations about what he was doing in the car for at least three hours. He also would not identify the other man with him.
Both men, along with the occupant of a nearby parked Mercedes-Benz, were in a position to see the unidentified man and woman who worked together to plant the bomb under the car driven by Sheremet.
The car belonged to his partner, Olena Prytula, a co-founder of Ukrainska Pravda with whom Sheremet lived on Ivana Franka Street. Prytula told the journalists that she and Sheremet had been followed shortly before his murder.
Parallel investigation
Ukraine’s authorities have had no success in solving high-profile murders of anybody, including journalists. Their best-known failure is the case of Ukrainska Pravda news website editor Georgiy Gongadze, who was strangled and beheaded by high-ranking police officers on Sept. 16, 2000.
Only the four immediate perpetrators of Gongadze’s murder were found and imprisoned — and even that took more than 10 years of constant international pressure. Those who ordered the killing have never faced justice. Officially and unofficially, ex-President Leonid Kuchma has been the prime suspect for years in the still-languishing case. He denies involvement.
Given law enforcement’s poor track record, Sheremet’s colleagues decided to launch their own investigation.
Over nine months, journalists Anna Babinets, Dmytro Gnap, Olena Loginova and Vlad Lavrov, a Kyiv Post staff writer and regional coordinator for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, meticulously reconstructed the events of the night. They collected hundreds of hours of surveillance video and found witnesses who were ignored by police.
SBU link
Surveillance video shows Ustymenko arriving at Ivana Franka Street outside the apartment building where Sheremet and Prytula lived, three hours before the bomb was planted at 2:4o a.m. on July 20 – five hours before the explosion at 7:40 a.m.
He parked his car 120 meters up the street from Sheremet’s parked car and drove away 40 minutes after the car bomb was planted.
During this time, Ustymenko and his passenger got in and out of the car and walked down the street and back. Minutes before a man and a woman showed up to plant the bomb, Ustymenko moved his car a little, parking it out of reach of surveillance cameras.
The driver of the second car, the Mercedes, arrived and left at the same time as Ustymenko, and talked to him during the night. Journalists have been unable to trace that car.
Ex-Security Service of Ukraine agent Ihor Ustymenko (L) is confronted with video that places him outside journalist Pavel Sheremet’s home on the night that a car bomb was planted that killed Sheremet on July 20. (OCCRP/Slidstvo.info)
Ustymenko, who lives in Odesa, refused to identify his passenger or the driver of the Mercedes to journalists. He gave a vague and inconsistent explanation of what he was doing at the crime scene.
The car he was driving, a gray Skoda Octavia, was registered in the name of Kyivan Natalya Zaretska, who said that Ustymenko asked her to register the car in her name. Zaretska and Ustymenko said investigators never contacted them, even though members of the Azov Battalion who had met with Sheremet on the night before the murder told investigators about the man suspiciously sitting in the parked Skoda.
The journalists discovered from an anonymous source that, as of 2014, Ustymenko had been working for the SBU. When later asked in a telephone call whether he worked for the SBU, Ustymenko hung up and stopped answering phone calls.
At the end of the documentary, the journalists said they had asked President Petro Poroshenko, SBU chief Vasyl Hrytsak, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov to answer questions about their findings.
All four either refused or failed to respond, the journalists said, a sharp contrast to their public proclamations immediately after Sheremet’s murder that solving the case is one of their highest priorities.
After the release of the documentary, the SBU hurriedly published a statement saying that Ustymenko had been fired in April 2014 and denied that journalists had sought comment. “If the journalists had asked us about Ustymenko before the release of the film, and not after, they probably wouldn’t have a story to tell,” said SBU spokeswoman Olena Gitlyanska.
At the premiere screening in Kyiv on May 10, the journalists involved revealed other troubling details.
As they were asking people near the crime scene for video from their surveillance cameras, one shop owner told them that SBU employees showed up before police investigators and took away his hard drive with the surveillance video, returning it erased.
The documentary revealed that months before the murder, an envelope was sent to Ukrainska Pravda anonymously, containing notes summarizing private phone and messages of journalists. Sheremet was among the journalists whose conversations were in the notes.
Musayeva-Borovik said that her sources in the Presidential Administration and law enforcement said that the notes were in a form commonly used at the SBU.
The SBU has a record of hostility towards journalists and has low credibility among the public.
Missed clues
Apart from the SBU connection, the documentary revealed other clues that the police apparently missed.
Previously released police footage showed the two assassins, a man and a woman who planted the bomb in Sheremet’s car in the early hours of July 20. In the video used to get the pubic’s help in locating the suspects, they appear to be wearing gray tracksuits. However, journalists obtained a color video from a camera installed one kilometer from where the police said they lost track of the pair. It showed that the tracksuits were black and the man’s hoodie had a distinctive white logo on the back.
This information, which would have been helpful in tracing the suspects, was never revealed to the public.
Using this new information, the journalists identified a man and a woman, who appear to be the same people from the nighttime footage, waiting near Sheremet’s house the next morning — apparently to detonate the bomb after the journalist got into the car.
The journalists also found a taxi driver who was briefly at the scene when the bomb was planted, and who said that police never contacted him. The journalists also, for the first time, found the video showing the face of a possible witness that the police asked the public’s help in finding. The police, however, released only video showing the back of the man who apparently looked directly at one of the murder suspects. The journalists also show videos of what appear to be a group of musicians walking near the crime scene.
Former National Police Chief Khatia Dekanoidze, who left the job four months after the Sheremet murder, citing political interference in her work, appears in the film to defend the work of police investigators. However, Dekanoidze is forgetful about key specific details of the case.
On May 11, the Interior Ministry said it would call in the documentary’s creators and former SBU employee Ustymenko for interrogation. It’s too early to tell whether this means authorities are taking the case more seriously or simply trying to head off a public relations disaster.
“When we were working on this documentary,” investigative journalist Babinets said at the premiere, “it felt like nobody cared about this murder except for us and those at Ukrainska Pravda.
