Vyacheslav Chornovil, the man who led the Ukrainian independence movement and headed the Rukh party didn’t die in a car crash but was murdered, former Deputy Prosecutor General Mykola Holomsha said in an interview with Channel 4.
According to him, Chornovil and his driver, Eugen Pavlov, were killed by blows with brass knuckles.
“We investigated the case of Chornovil’s murder,” said Holomsha on Sept. 14. “It was definitely not an accident. The airbags were turned off, the scene inspection was falsified, and the main witness was killed in Volyn.”
The Interior Ministry and Prosecutor General’s office have not yet commented on the former prosecutor’s statement.
Mykola Holomsha became deputy prosecutor general in November 2003. In April 2007, he became the chief prosecutor of Lviv Oblast. A month later, he was reappointed to his old job, where he worked over the next three years.
During that time, Holomsha oversaw the investigation of some of the country’s most prominent criminal cases, including the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze and the poisoning of President Viktor Yushchenko. In July 2010 he was demoted to military prosecutor of the central region.
In February 2014 acting prosecutor general Oleg Makhnitsky appointed Holomsha as his deputy once more. But in October, Prosecutor General Vitaly Yarema dismissed him due to the lustration law, which restricts officials from the administration of former President Viktor Yanukovych from taking public office.
It is not the first time that Holomsha said that Chornovil was killed. In 2015 in an interview with publication Segonya, he said that the investigators believe that Chornovil may have been “finished off” after the car accident.
“The investigation faced incredible difficulties and obstacles, we were not allowed to work. Then it got strange — the key persons involved in the case began to die”.
Vyacheslav Chornovil, an opposition presidential candidate running against former President Leonid Kuchma, died on March 25, 1999, when the car in which he was riding slammed into the side of a truck. He was 61.
Authorities said the death was a road accident but family members and a growing number of Ukrainians were skeptical because the government refused to investigate any other possibility and quickly granted amnesty to the truck driver, dashing hopes for an open trial. A video-recorded confession of alleged police involvement surfaced but then was mysteriously misplaced.
Chornovil’s son Taras insisted that his father’s death was a politically motivated killing.
A leading figure of the 1960s generation of Ukrainian political dissidents, Chornovil spent most of 1967 to 1985 in Soviet prison camps or Siberian exile. But he continued his activism and went on to play a key role in realizing his life-long dream of an independent Ukraine.
Chornovil’s death came at a time when his role in contemporary Ukrainian politics had come under sharp criticism and the party he helped create, Rukh (‘the Movement’ or, more formally, ‘the People’s Movement of Ukraine’) was in the throes of a bitter split that was largely aimed at sidelining him from mainstream politics.
