Kyiv’s Shevchenkivsky District Court on April 30 released from a detention facility Andriy Antonenko, a suspect in the case into the murder of journalist Pavel Sheremet.
Antonenko was placed under house arrest. The prosecutor did not object to him being released from detention.
Belarusian-born Sheremet was blown up in his car in central Kyiv on July 20, 2016.
Antonenko, Yulia Kuzmenko and Yana Dugar were arrested as suspects in the Sheremet case in December 2019. The investigators alleged that the three of them conspired, and Antonenko and Kuzmenko placed a bomb under Sheremet’s car.
Subsequently Kuzmenko was placed under house arrest, and Dugar was released from custody with travel restrictions. Antonenko was the only suspect in the case in jail as of April 30.
Critics of the investigation see the evidence against them as very weak and have been calling for the release of Antonenko and Kuzmenko for more than a year. The main alleged proof against the suspects is gait analysis, which cannot be used as primary evidence, according to forensic science guidelines.
In January EUobserver, a Brussels-based English-language publication, and the Belarusian People’s Tribunal, an opposition group run by exiled Belarusian police officer Igor Makar, published a recording of alleged Belarusian KGB officials discussing murdering journalist Pavel Sheremet. The recording was made in 2012, four years before he was killed in Kyiv.
Meanwhile, the suspects’ defense attorneys argued that the new Belarusian evidence refutes the official version since there is no evidence of any links between their clients and Belarus.
There is another link to Belarus in the events preceding Sheremet’s killing.
On the night before Sheremet’s murder, Sergei Korotkikh, a Belarusian national and member of the Azov volunteer battalion, and other Azov fighters visited Sheremet’s house. The violent and controversial background of Korotkikh, a neo-Nazi, has attracted attention to him since then.
Korotkikh has denied having anything to do with Sheremet’s murder and has called him a friend of his.
