Pediatric surgeon Yulia Kuzmenko, a suspect in the car bombing that killed Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet in 2016, has been released from a detention facility and placed under house arrest by the Kyiv Court of Appeals.
The news of Kuzmenko’s release broke after the court hearing on Aug. 11, which was closed to the media and public.
Upon leaving the courthouse, Kuzmenkio headed home after spending almost eight months in custody.
Sheremet was a well-known journalist whose career spanned his native Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. At the time of his death, he worked as an editor at the Ukrainska Pravda news site and hosted a show on Ukraine’s Radio Vesti.
Sheremet was killed on the morning of July 20, 2016, when his car exploded in the Kyiv city center as he was driving to work.
In December 2019, Kuzmenko and Andriy Antonenko, a rock musician, were charged with murdering Sheremet by planting a bomb under his car and placed in pretrial detention. Military paramedic Yana Dugar was charged with complicity for allegedly helping them. She was placed under house arrest and later released on bail.
The murder charges against the three suspects proved highly controversial. Many members of Ukraine’s civil society said the case against them lacked convincing evidence. Others alleged that controversial Interior Minister Arsen Avakov was trying to hang onto his job by quickly solving the case.
Four years after Sheremet’s death, the masterminds of his assassination have not yet been brought to justice or even publicly named.
According to Ukrainska Pravda, during the Aug. 11 hearing, a lawyer representing Kuzmenko argued that her arrest goes against the norms of the European Court of Human Rights and that there is no reason to believe she poses a flight risk.The prosecution asked the court to keep her in custody.
Speaking before the court, Kuzmenko reportedly said that the allegations against her and the other suspects were political persecution intended to undermine volunteers helping Ukraine’s military and veterans.
Currently, Antonenko remains in pre-trial detention.
