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Ukrainian journalist Georgy Gongadze disappeared exactly 20 years ago… On September 16, 2000, he left work, but never returned home.
A few months earlier, in June, he said he had noticed that he was being followed: unknown persons were accompanying the journalist in a Zhiguli car. AND November 2 in the Tarashchansky forest a beheaded man was found 100 kilometers from Kiev gongadze body.
On Memorial Day, the US Embassy in Ukraine asked the journalist to thoroughly and promptly investigate crimes against journalists. “Today we remember Giorgi Gongadze, a brave journalist who was killed for fighting for the truth. No member of the press should be threatened, assaulted or arrested for doing their job, and crimes against journalists should be thoroughly and quickly investigated so that the individuals responsible were responsible for this. Independent media are an important part of successful democracies, “said the diplomats.
OBOZREVATEL offers to recall the story of the assassination that shocked Ukraine.
Who was Georgy Gongadze?
Georgy Gongadze was born in 1969 in Georgia, but at the age of 20 he moved to Lviv, where he transferred to the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the Ivan Franko Lviv National University. He became an active public figure, joined the ranks of the party “People’s Movement of Ukraine” and the Student Brotherhood.
In 1999, when Gongadze became the host of the daily show “First Tour with Georgy Gongadze” on “Continent” radio, threatening phone calls began to the station’s management.
And on April 17, 2000, the publication “The Ukrainian Truth”, whose founder and editor-in-chief was Georgy Gongadze, appeared on the Internet. Among other things, he published materials on Leonid Kuchma and his entourage.
Gongadze’s death
On September 16, 2000, Gongadze disappeared while returning home from work. On November 2, her decapitated body was found in the Tarashchansky forest. His wife and friends identified Georgy from the scars he bore from the shrapnel wound.
That same year, in June, Georgy himself announced that he was under surveillance. Unidentified people in Zhiguli waited for Gongadze near his home in the morning and near his workplace at night.
On July 14, the journalist officially sent a letter to the Attorney General of Ukraine, Mikhail Potebenko, but the department formally reacted to the appeal. It was only established that the vehicle from which Gongadze was being monitored had the license plates removed from the registry a year ago.
Investigation
Only in February 2001 was a criminal case initiated under the article “Intentional murder”. After another 8 years, in 2009, the remains of a skull were found, which also belonged to George.
On March 1, 2005, the President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, officially announced that the murderers of Georgy Gongadze had been arrested. On March 3, Attorney General Svyatoslav Piskun said that his subordinates intend to question the former interior minister the next morning. Yuri Kravchenko as the main witness.
However, the next day, Kravchenko was found dead at his dacha in Koncha-Zaspa. He died of two gunshot wounds to the head. According to the investigation, the former minister “committed suicide.”
In 2008, the Kiev Court of Appeal found three former employees of the Department of External Surveillance and Criminal Intelligence of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine guilty of Gongadze’s murder. Nikolay Protasov received 13 years in prison (died in March 2015 in a colony), Valery Kostenko and Alexander Popovich – 12.
In 2011, the former head of the main criminal investigation department of the Ministry of the Interior Alexey Pukach During the trial, he admitted that he had personally killed Georgy Gongadze and named those who ordered the murder: Leonid Kuchma, Vladimir Litvin and Yuri Kravchenko.
On January 29, 2013, Pukach was sentenced to life imprisonment with confiscation of assets and a ban from holding public office.
The journalist’s funeral took place only 16 years after his death, in March 2016.
As OBOZREVATEL reported, Pukach’s words about Kuchma and Lytvyn’s involvement in the Gongadze murder disappeared from the case file.
