You're reading: RFE/RL: CPJ concerned over life sentence appeal in Gongadze murder

RFE/RL: CPJ concerned over life sentence appeal in Gongadze murder

Published Sept. 17, 2019 at 12:51 pm

Oleksiy Pukach, 66, ex-head of the Interior Ministry of Ukraine's surveillance department, talks to the Kyiv Post during an interview in Lukianivske SIZO pre-trial detention center in Kyiv on July 12, 2019.

Photo by Volodymyr Petrov

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on September 16 “expressed concern” over the possibility that a former Ukrainian police general who confessed to the murder of a journalist may have his life prison sentence commuted.

Oleksiy Pukach, who once headed the surveillance department of Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, was sentenced in January 2013 for the murder of Heorhiy Gongadze 13 years earlier on September 16.