The trial opened Thursday of a former senior Ukrainian official on charges of murdering critical journalist Georgy Gongadze in 2000, the most notorious crime in the country's post-Soviet history. Olexy Pukach, the former head of the Ukrainian interior ministry's intelligence bureau, is the highest-ranking official yet to face trial over the brutal murder of Gongadze, 31, in a forest outside Kiev.
His closed-door trial coincides with a surge in interest in the case after prosecutors also charged Ukraine's former president Leonid Kuchma with involvement in the murder after years of pressure from the journalist's supporters. The trial got under way at the Pechersky district court in Kiev under tight secrecy with none of the media massed outside allowed in the courtroom. Pukach himself was not present and the trial was adjourned until May 26.
Valentina Telechenko, the representative of Gongadze's widow, confirmed to the press that Thursday's preliminary hearing was closed to the public and it was likely that the same conditions would apply to further hearings. "Today it became clear that the trial is likely to be extremely long," she said. Andriy Fedur, the lawyer of Gongadze's mother Lesya, said the decision to hold the process behind closed doors was incomprehensible as "no question regarding secrets was raised."
Pukach was arrested in July 2009 and prosecutors have said he has confessed to personally strangling Gongadze, who founded the still highly respected Ukrainian news website Ukrainska Pravda. Ukraine in March 2008 sentenced three former officials from the interior ministry intelligence department - Valeriy Kostenko, Mykola Protasov and Olexander Popovych - to terms of 12 to 13 years in prison for carrying out the killing. But even after their former chief Pukach was finally arrested, Gongadze's supporters continued to argue that the murder had been ordered at an even higher level.
They point to tapes recorded by a former bodyguard of Kuchma and made public in 2000 where voices alleged to be of the former president and his ex-chief of staff Volodymyr Lytvyn are heard speaking about eliminating Gongadze. Crucially, prosecutors have now ruled that the tapes are admissible evidence. The tapes, whose publication at the time prompted mass protests in Ukraine, contain a voice resembling that of Kuchma suggesting to have Gongadze "kidnapped by Chechens".
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