Top prosecutor concludes Tarascha corpse is Gongadze (09/08/02)

Top prosecutor concludes Tarascha corpse is Gongadze

Parliamentary committee seeks charges against Kuchma and associates

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Procurator General Sviatoslav Piskun announced on September 3 that his office had conclusively determined that the still unburied corpse found in a forest outside the village of Tarascha nearly two years ago is indeed the remains of the journalist Heorhii Gongadze.

On a day the Gongadze affair returned to the center of public attention in Ukraine - and just days before the second anniversary of the young journalist's disappearance on September 16, 2000 - the head of the ad hoc parliamentary commission on the Gongadze affair further re-energized a story that had fallen off the political radar screen for the most part, when he told reporters he had filed documents with Mr. Piskun's office requesting that it charge President Leonid Kuchma and close political associates - many also holding high political office - on four criminal matters and begin a formal investigation. Hryhorii Omelchenko alleged several specific criminal actions in which the group had been involved, including the disappearance of the Ukrainian journalist.

Mr. Omelchenko returned from the United States with notarized affidavits of testimony from the three, which were made part of the package submitted to the Procurator General's Office.

Mr. Gongadze was a vocal critic of the Kuchma administration prior to and right after the 1999 presidential elections, although not particularly well-known in political circles. Prior to his disappearance, the Internet journalist had run a series of stories charging President Kuchma and his political cronies with widespread corruption.

Mr. Piskun said that a panel of medical experts who had reviewed all the evidence gathered in regards to the corpse, which was discovered in a shallow grave on November 16, 2000, two months after Mr. Gongadze disappeared, had concluded that there is no question that it belonges to the late journalist.

"The General Procurator's Office received the conclusive medical examiner's report on the Tarascha body," explained Mr. Piskun. "The body belongs to Heorhii Gongadze, 100 percent."

He also noted that, contrary to earlier statements, the experts determined that the cause of the death was the decapitation of the body. The earlier report had indicated that the head had been severed after the person had expired.

Mr. Piskun said he would inform the journalist's mother, Lesia, and then decide how to proceed. Lesia Gongadze, who lives in Lviv, has been a thorn in the side of investigators since the Tarascha body turned up because she has refused to accept earlier results, including DNA testing, which officials said proved the corpse belonged to her son. She has charged that to stymie the investigation law enforcement officials might have gone so far as to change bodies or testing samples on order from high government officials, who feared the investigation could eventually implicate them.

Mrs. Gongadze's attorney said on September 5 that he had not seen the procurator's documents and had yet to hold a meeting with his client and, therefore, had no comment on the matter at the moment. The previous day Mrs. Gongadze told Ukrainska Pravda, the Internet newspaper that her son founded, that until she had a chance to see the details of the reports and determine whether they included the DNA test on the hair of her son, which she had supplied months before, she could not accept the conclusion made by Mr. Piskun.

Mr. Piskun said during his press conference that the 10-member panel that reviewed the case, "beginning from point zero," consisted of a group of medical professionals from the Ministry of Health who had from 15 to 40 years' experience each. He also said that while reviewing the work of investigators done under his predecessor, Mykhailo Potebenko, his investigative team found major flaws and errors, and discovered additional evidence at the site of the unearthed burial site, which had been overlooked for two years.

He said that his office had arrested the Tarascha county prosecutor for failing to perform his duties and covering up evidence in the case.

Mr. Piskun explained that reports from testing done in April by an FBI team of forensic specialists, which originally confirmed that the Tarascha body was Mr. Gongadze's, were taken into consideration as well in making the final analysis.

U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual told The Weekly he supported the claims made by the Ukrainian chief prosecutor and said that there was little chance that the body belonged to anybody but the missing journalist. He said that during the FBI examination Mrs. Gongadze had submitted hair samples and X-rays of her missing son, as well as tissue samples taken from his twin daughters, which were compared against tissue taken from all parts of the Tarascha body. The conclusions the FBI team drew were conclusive and consistent, explained Mr. Pascual.

"As the doctors have explained to me, when you have X-rays and hair and skin DNA there can be little doubt that it is his body" said Mr. Pascual, who then added, "There is no doubt."

Rada committee levels charges

As the fate of the Tarascha body, apparently, was finally decided, National Deputy Omelchenko, the chair of the ad hoc parliamentary committee on the Gongadze affair, announced that he had forwarded recommendations made by the committee to bring criminal charges against President Kuchma and several political cohorts, including Volodymyr Lytvyn, his former chief of staff, today the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada; the former head of the Security Service of Ukraine Leonid Derkach; former Minister of Internal Affairs Yuri Kravchenko; and current Tax Administration Chairman Mykola Azarov.

In one of the documents, the officials are accused of "collaborating to organize the kidnapping of Heorhii Gongadze, which led to fatal consequences," while in another one President Kuchma and Mr. Azarov are charged with forcing an apartment owner to give up his dwelling, located in a choice section of Kyiv in favor of the chief taxman of Ukraine.

Other documents accuse the president's political cronies and other associates with more high felonies and abuses of office, including organizing a felonious assault on National Deputy Oleksander Eliashkevych in February 2000, an attack that left him with a concussion and a broken nose; the illegal use of wiretaps and eavesdropping devices to listen to the conversations of various members of the political opposition; and illegal arms sales to Iraq.

The evidence that Mr. Omelchenko submitted is based largely on the Melnychenko tapes, digital recordings made by Maj. Mykola Melnychenko during the first nine months of 2000 when he worked in the security detachment assigned to the presidential offices. The recordings allegedly contain scores of hours of conversations between President Kuchma and the various parties named in the parliamentary committee report.

Mr. Melnychenko released the tapes to Socialist Party leader Oleksander Moroz, long a political opponent of President Kuchma, in November 2000. Mr. Melnychenko, who eventually requested and obtained political asylum in the United States after hiding in Europe for several months, explained at the time that he did so as a service to his country because he could no longer watch as the president and his team committed high crimes.

Although tests done initially to determine whether the recordings were altered or forged proved inconclusive, a second test by the U.S. firm Bek Tek is said to have shown they are authentic.

Mr. Omelchenko, who is a member of the Yulia Tymoshenko faction in the Verkhovna Rada, spent several weeks in the U.S. during the summer gathering information on the various aspects of his report. Most importantly, he met personally with key players in the Gongadze affair and the tape scandal, notably Mr. Melnychenko, Myroslava Gongadze, the missing journalist's wife, and Mr. Eliashkevych. Mrs. Gongadze requested and received political asylum in the U.S. at the time Mr. Melnychenko did, while Mr. Eliashkevych has sought shelter in the U.S. since he lost criminal immunity after not being re-elected to office in March.

The 12-member committee headed by Mr. Omelchenko has a decidedly anti-Kuchma flavor. Formed in January of this year, after an earlier one headed by Oleksander Lavrynovych, who now is the minister of justice, could not reach a conclusion on how to proceed further in its investigation, it consists exclusively of members of the four parliamentary factions that have refused to enter a pro-presidential parliamentary bloc.

On September 4 Procurator General Piskun said he had not yet received the materials submitted to his office by the Omelchenko committee.

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