U.S. expert: Melnychenko tapes not altered (02/17/02)

U.S. expert: Melnychenko tapes not altered

by Yaro Bihun
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

WASHINGTON - The head of a special Ukrainian parliamentary commission reported that an analysis by a leading American audio expert of the tape recordings that appear to implicate President Leonid Kuchma in the killing of journalist Heorhii Gongadze confirm that they have not been edited or otherwise altered.

Oleksandr Zhyr, who heads a Verkhovna Rada panel looking into the killing, made the announcement here on February 7, during a live, hourlong news conference program on the Ukrainian service of Radio Liberty.

Mr. Zhyr said that the tape analysis was made by Bruce Koenig, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's top audio expert, now retired and working for a private company, BEK TEK. Mr. Koenig is known widely for his work in a number of high-profile cases involving audio recordings, including the Linda Tripp telephone recordings of Monica Lewinsky, which played a key role in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

Appearing with Mr. Zhyr in the radio news conference was the former presidential guard who secretly taped the president, Mykola Melnychenko, and the slain journalist's widow, Myroslava Gongadze. The three, in Radio Liberty's Washington Studio, answered questions posed by Ukrainian journalists in Kyiv.

During the broadcast Mr. Melnychenko again denied reports that he had made his tape recordings available to the FBI, and Ms. Gongadze indicated that she is looking into the possibility of filing a civil suit in U.S. courts in the matter of her husband's murder.

Of the hundreds of hours of recordings secretly made by Mr. Melnychenko, the Verkhovna Rada commission gave Mr. Koenig only portions dealing with the Gongadze case. Mr. Zhyr explained that, dealing as they do with murder, they are the most important in the collection. He added, however, that the commission ultimately would like to have the others analyzed as well.

Mr. Zhyr did not release Mr. Koenig's complete report, noting that the commission would release it after his return to Kyiv. He read only one of its conclusions, which stated that the "recordings are consistent with being cloned recordings, and there are no indications of alterations or edits to the audio data in the five designated areas" on the two files.

"Based on the flow of the speech in the five designated portions, no phraseology or sentence structure was pieced together by using individual phonemes, words or short phrases," the report said.

Mr. Zhyr noted that Mr. Koenig said he would be willing to testify about the tapes at "any court proceeding, any organization up to and including a United Nations tribunal." He added, however, that "with Mykhailo Potebenko as the procurator general, we will never be able to conduct a full and objective investigation of these criminal cases" in Ukraine. Mr. Potebenko, he pointed out, is a participant in some of the taped conversations.

The Ukrainian lawmaker hinted that if the government of Ukraine does not pursue this matter in Ukrainian courts, the commission may well pursue it in European or other international tribunals, as was done recently with other prominent human rights violators - Augusto Pinochet of Chile and Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.

Mr. Melnychenko repeatedly stressed that he gave the tapes - which he made on a Toshiba recorder - only to the parliamentary commission and that only the commission will decide which of the tapes will be made public and when.

Mentioning the possibility of a civil suit in the United States, Ms. Gongadze said that, fortunately, international law provides for many ways to protect human rights.

"My suit would focus on the denial of human rights with respect to the killing of my husband as well as the denial of human rights to the aggrieved party as a result of the incompetent investigation of this crime," she said.

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