Just a day after a group of detectives arrived in Odesa from Kyiv to investigate the shooting of a local civil activist, Oleg Mykhailyk, Odesa police reported they had apprehended three petty criminals as suspects in the murder case.
Local law enforcement invited civil activists to a meeting on Sept. 25 at the office of Odesa Oblast Governor Maksym Stepanov, hoping to persuade them police and prosecutors had acted swiftly in the case.
Activists had earlier picketed the Odesa main police department complaining police were doing too little to investigate a spate of recent violent attacks on civil activists.
“Three people have been detained, there are grounds to suspect them of this grave crime,” Odesa Regional Prosecutor Oleg Zhuchenko said at the meeting, praising the “professionalism” of the local police and prosecutors office.
He added that one suspect had planned Mykhailyk’s murder and followed him. The investigators are now looking for the person who ordered the attack, he said.
Mykhailyk, a leader of Odesa branch of Syla Lyudey (Power of the People) a civil society-based political party and a critic of Odesa Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov, was shot in the chest near his house late on Sept. 22. He lost 1.5 liters of blood but survived, the bullet just missing his heart.
But Mykhailyk’s friends questioned the police’s findings and claimed they haven’t seen any proof that they had found the real attackers.
“This is too suspiciously convenient and a bit awkward,” Igor Bychkov, the head of Syla Lyudey party branch in Odesa Oblast, told the Kyiv Post by phone.
Bychkov, who attended the meeting, said the police didn’t give any proof that the three suspects, who are all the Georgian nationals, known in the city as pickpockets, could have made the murder attempt.
“Pickpockets are not hitmen. Pickpockets are usually controlled by the police… And now when it was necessary, the police just showed them off, like in some trick,” he said.
Zhuchenko, the prosecutor, claimed on Sept. 25 that police had issued arrest warrants for all three suspects. A local news website Dumskaya reported that one of them, Tornike Gerasin, was in hospital, and posted a photo of him lying on a hospital bed.
Another activist Alina Radchenko, who was attacked in Odesa in 2017, also said she had doubts that the police had found the right people. She recalled the acid attack on Kherson whistleblower official Kateryna Gandziuk, in which the police initially captured a suspect but later had to release him after journalists found proof that he had an alibi.
“They may have arrested some random people who are on their hook, just to decrease the public outrage,” Radchenko wrote on her Facebook.
After the attack on Mykhailyk, dozens of activists started picketing the main police office in Odesa Oblast, claiming local law enforcement were refusing to investigate a series of violent attacks on activists in the city.
They demanded the resignation of Zhuchenko and Dmytro Golovin, the head of national police in Odesa Oblast, claiming that both were incompetent and totally dependent on Mayor Trukhanov and his cronies.
The police granted bodyguards to Mykhailyk, who is still in hospital with the bullet still in his body. Doctors will remove it when he is strong enough to undergo surgery, Bychkov said.
