Procurator General opens murder investigation in Gongadze case

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The Procurator General of Ukraine opened an official murder investigation into the death of Heorhii Gongadze on February 27, a day after it acknowledged for the first time that the body found more than three months ago outside of the town of Tarascha, 75 miles outside of Kyiv, was indeed that of the missing journalist.

The belated decision to begin to investigate the disappearance of the controversial journalist as a premeditated murder came nearly two months after the Procurator General's Office announced that a DNA analysis of the body showed there was a 99.6 percent probability the body found was that of the missing journalist and more than five months since the journalist disappeared.

Procurator General Mykhailo Potebenko, who had said in January that the DNA result had showed less certainty than he required - and had explained that he could not take responsibility for declaring Mr. Gongadze dead only to have him reappear in the future - was not present at the announcement.

His second-in-command, Deputy Procurator General Oleksii Bahanets, had explained to reporters a week earlier that the DNA results did not exclude the possibility that the body could be that of a sibling of the dead journalist - even though Mr. Gongadze was an only child. Mr. Bahanets said the change in determination was based on "additional data" from medical experts, but did not explain what that data was.

However, several days earlier, during a special program on the Russian television channel NTV which was dedicated to the Gongadze affair and Tapegate, the Russian forensic DNA expert who conducted the analysis said the probability his analysis had achieved was 99.9 percent, and not 99.6 percent as Mr. Potebenko had repeatedly maintained.

Mr. Bahanets also announced that Mr. Gongadze's wife, Myrosia, and mother, Lesia, had been given official status as victims in the case, which now gives them and their legal representatives the right to present and examine evidence, and take part in all aspects of the investigation. The public prosecutor's office made the decision after losing a ruling in a lower court on the matter last week - a ruling it originally said it would appeal.

But the decision did little to comfort the dead journalist's mother, who has battled official resistance to a murder investigation for months. Although the public prosecutor finally is willing to turn the body of Mr. Gongadze over to the next of kin for burial, Mrs. Gongadze said she would not accept it, demanding instead that another autopsy of the body take place with her representatives present.

"They gave us a death certificate, but the reason for the death, the date of the death, where his head is - nobody can tell me this," said the journalist's mother, according to Reuters. "They want me to bury him so that [the case] can be forgotten," she added.

The following day Mr. Gongadze's mother had her first meeting with Procurator General Potebenko, whose resignation she has demanded, accusing him of covering up details of the investigation. Afterwards, she announced that Mr. Potebenko had agreed to "look into the matter of a second expert analysis."

On February 23 President Leonid Kuchma had indicated after meeting with a U.S. congressional delegation that he had accepted an offer made by the U.S. lawmakers to have specialists of the FBI do another forensic analysis of the Tarascha body and urged the Procurator General's Office to cooperate.

The elder Mrs. Gongadze has also asked for a separate meeting with President Kuchma. In a letter to the Ukrainian head of state she implored him to help resolve the case and said that perhaps a meeting with her would help determine the truth.

"You are the president of the country and the guarantor of the Constitution, and I have to believe you," Mrs. Gongadze wrote in her letter.

Mrs. Gongadze's attorney, Andrii Fedur, who delivered the correspondence directly to Mr. Kuchma during a meeting with him on February 26, said afterwards that he believes the president will fulfill the mother's request. He also said that he had conveyed to the president his client's firm belief that Mr. Potebenko "must bear responsibility for the infringements made during the investigation."

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, March 4, 2001, No. 9, Vol. LXIX

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