It sounds like the screenplay for a Hollywood thriller: the wife of a politician, an abusive husband, shoоts him dead in the yard of their burning family mansion and then escapes to Russia with her daughter and younger lover – her husband’s chauffeur.
But this is the real story of 35-year-old lawmaker Anatoliy Zhuk, a city council member from Sumy, an industrial city of 265,000 people some 330 kilometers northeast of Kyiv, near the border with Russia.
Zhuk’s father found the lawmaker dead in the yard of his own private mansion on Aug. 2. He had been shot twice.
His wife, 31-year-old Hanna Zhuk, who was still at the crime scene, had a questionable alibi and refused to cooperate with police, claiming she was ill, Viacheslav Abroskin, deputy head of the National Police of Ukraine wrote on Facebook on Aug. 21.
However, on Aug. 8 she and Zhuk’s 10-year-old daughter, along with 28-year-old Oleksandr Yatsenko, who was a personal driver of her late husband, managed to escape from Ukraine and soon after asked for political asylum in Russia, Abroskin added.
After more than a month of investigation, the Sumy Prosecutors Office declared that Hanna Zhuk was the main suspect in the murder of her husband. She had carefully planned the crime with Yatsenko, reads a message published by the Sumy Prosecutors Office on Sept. 7.
Investigators said the Zhuks had a difficult marriage. Hanna Zhuk had been previously complaining to her close friends about her husband being abusive to her, beating her. They had even separated for a while, prosecutors said.
But she had not wanted to file for a divorce, as Zhuk threatened to take full custody of their daughter.
The woman had carefully planned the killing of her husband. On Aug. 2 she sent her daughter to stay with her grandmother.
Then she set the house, where Zhuk was having a nap, on fire.
In order to make herself an alibi, she then traveled to the city center in the car driven by her lover to pay the utility bills. Previously, she had always paid bills via the internet, investigators said.
Meanwhile, Zhuk woke up, tackled the blaze and called his wife. She returned home. After they carried out to the yard the furniture damaged by the blaze, the driver went to a nearby petrol station.
Zhuk decided to take a nap again, this time in the yard of his house. When he fell asleep, Hanna Zhuk took an unregistered CZ-75 semi-automatic pistol and shot at her husband three times, with two bullets hitting him, prosecutors said.
“The investigators found gunpowder particles on the woman’s sleeves and on the jeans she was wearing that day. He clothes were confiscated as an evidence,” prosecutors said on Sept. 7.
Prosecutors and National Police of Sumy on Sept. 7 issued a note of suspicion for arson and homicide for Zhuk in absentia. If found guilty, Zhuk faces from seven to 15 years in prison.
Prosecutors also said they were preparing all the documents required to file a request for her extradition from Russia.
