Pustovoitenko claims he has info on Gongadze murderers (12/02/01)

Pustovoitenko claims he has info on Gongadze murderers

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Procurator General Mykhailo Potebenko said on November 26 that Valerii Pustovoitenko, Ukraine's former prime minister and current minister of transportation, must either offer details or apologize for a statement he made that he has the names of individuals complicit in the murder of Heorhii Gongadze.

"If he fabricated the story for political benefit, then he should apologize to law enforcement officials," explained Mr. Potebenko, who added that if he has hard evidence the politician is required by law to pass it on to authorities.

Mr. Pustovoitenko, however, issued no apology or retraction after he met with Ukraine's chief prosecutor later that day. He merely acknowledged to journalists that a meeting had taken place.

"I told them that I am a law-abiding citizen and then told them what a law-abiding person should," said Mr. Pustovoitenko, who has been subject to much criticism in the press for claims that he knows how the Ukrainian journalist was murdered. Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Procurator General's Office said it was against the law for the agency to divulge information regarding ongoing criminal investigations.

Mr. Pustovoitenko raised a cloud of controversy on November 15 when he told a correspondent of Ukrainska Pravda, the Internet newspaper that Mr. Gongadze founded several months before his disappearance and apparent death last autumn, that he had obtained specific details on the murder of the controversial journalist and knows the names of the perpetrators.

Mr. Pustovoitenko, who is also the chairman of the National Democratic Party, said he had received information from the Moscow-based Agency for Journalistic Research, which earlier this year had announced in Kyiv that it would conduct an independent investigation into the disappearance of the Georgian-born and Lviv-raised Ukrainian journalist.

"I have a report regarding the Gongadze matter, which I have hidden in three separate vaults," said Mr. Pustovoitenko. "I will not reveal it because I have no proof that it occurred as written. But now I understand many of the positions taken in this matter."

He explained at the time that he understood that only the Procurator General's Office had the legal authority and responsibility to investigate the Gongadze affair, and that the information gathered by the Moscow research agency could be useful at the moment only as guiding information subject to analysis.

Mr. Pustovoitenko said "guilty parties" are named in the report but refused to be more specific until after the parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for March.

"Approach me after the elections, and I'll tell you," said Mr. Pustovoitenko.

The announcement caused an immediate stir within various political circles. Two days after Mr. Pustovoitenko's statement, National Deputy Yurii Karmazyn, chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Organized Crime, called on the procurator general to question Mr. Pustovoitenko and to prepare criminal proceedings against him for withholding evidence in a serious criminal offense, which is considered a crime in Ukraine.

"Pustovoitenko's obligation, as it would be for any ordinary citizen, is to immediately notify law enforcement officials that he has in his possession information about this crime and to hand over the relevant material to investigators without linking it to parliamentary elections," explained Mr. Karmazyn, according to Interfax-Ukraine.

President Leonid Kuchma took a more nuanced approach to the matter when he commented on it during a visit to the National University of Ostroh Academy on November 23. Mr. Kuchma said that he believes Mr. Pustovoitenko made his statement for political effect.

"In fact, he does not and did not have anything," said Mr. Kuchma.

The meeting between Mr. Pustovoitenko and Procurator General's Office officials came just two days shy of the first anniversary since the Gongadze affair attained international scope; when National Deputy Oleksander Moroz announced on November 28, 2000, during a session of the Verkhovna Rada that he had recordings implicating the president of Ukraine and other high-ranking officials in the journalist's disappearance.

Since violent demonstrations in early March, which some political leaders had been certain would lead to the downfall of the Kuchma administration, the affair and the criminal investigation both have slowly petered out with no major new revelations. Key players, such as Maj. Mykola Melnychenko, part of the presidential security service, who has claimed responsibility for recording President Kuchma in his office, and Myroslava Gongadze, the wife of the slain journalist who had pushed the investigation along, both have taken political asylum in the United States.

Mr. Gongadze's mother, Lesia, who continues to raise doubts that the remains of the corpse being held in the Kyiv city morgue belong to her son and refuses to claim it for burial, has kept the controversy surrounding the death of her son in the public light in Ukraine.

The ad hoc parliamentary investigative committee looking into the details of the Gongadze affair presented the first new initiative in several weeks when on November 27 it announced that it would appeal to the Council of Europe (CE) for an international commission of inquiry into the disappearance of the young journalist. Chairman Oleksander Zhyr said he hoped the commission would be created during a CE Ministers' Committee session scheduled for November 30.

The Verkhovna Rada committee called on such a commission to initially perform an additional DNA examination on the body believed to belong to the murdered journalist, which was found in mid-November of last year 75 miles outside of Kyiv near the town of Tarascha. The parliamentary committee also stated that it intended to invite both President Kuchma, who has failed to answer previous requests to appear to answer questions regarding the Melnychenko recordings, and Mr. Pustovoitenko to testify.

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