The staff of Ukrainska Pravda, a Ukrainian independent news website, has called on Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, and National Police Chief Serhiy Knyazev to resign over the unsolved murder of journalist Pavel Sheremet.
The journalists issued their demand on July 20, the third anniversary of Sheremet’s death. Since 2016, the official investigation has made little progress in solving the crime and has not even identified a single suspect.
“Then-president Petro Poroshenko called solving this crime ‘a matter of honor’ and a test for the state. The heads of all law enforcement agencies also made statements. But, over time, those declarations turned into shameful silence,” Ukrainska Pravda said in post on its website.
“On the third anniversary of Sheremet’s murder, we — the colleagues, friends, and family of Pavel — can confidently acknowledge that the official investigation has not progressed a bit. The case still has neither a primary lead nor suspects, let alone the hitmen and organizers who ordered the murder.”
“Today we demand political liability for the heads of law enforcement agencies who have not been able to answer the question ‘Who killed Pavel?’”
The last public report on the murder took place in February 2017, the statement read. Half a year later, in September, investigators made the case secret. Since then official requests to law enforcement for information have gone unanswered.
Also on July 20, President Volodymyr Zelensky told Lutsenko, Avakov, Knyazev, and Ivan Bakanov, acting head of the Security Service of Ukraine, to report on the progress in the murder investigation on July 23.
Watch: Killing Pavel
Belarus-born journalist Sheremet worked in his homeland, Russia, and, in the last four years of his life, in Ukraine.
On July 20, 2016, he was killed by a car bomb in central Kyiv. After his killing, a group of investigative journalists began their own investigation. Ten months later, they presented a documentary featuring new evidence that the official probe missed.
