Journalists Insist on Studying All Versions of Kolomiyets’s Death
On November 19 representatives of Belarusian law enforcement bodies confirmed the identity of the body of Mykhailo Kolomiyets, director of the Ukrayinski novyny [Ukrainian News] agency, who disappeared in late October. One of the principal versions is suicide.
We have no right to let the suicide version version become dominant, believes Kolomiyets’s business partner, head of the Oversight Council of the Agency for Humanitarian Technologies Volodymyr Hranovsky.
At a November 20 press conference in Kyiv he said there are no grounds to believe that there was even one single reason for such a “sober-minded, serious, and pragmatic person” as Mr. Kolomiyets to commit suicide. In Mr. Hranovsky’s opinion, all versions should be recognized as equal, and the murder version should be investigated along with the suicide one.
Answering journalists’ questions, Mr. Hranovsky said that his agency had learned about the financial state of the agency headed by Kolomiyets only from audit results, and no discussion on editorial policy had taken place (both HTA and Mykhailo Kolomiyets owned 50% of Ukrayinski novyny). The partnership was built according to the scheme of “giving a loan to the Ukrayinsky novyny, increasing the number of subscribers, and another loan” (as regards the agency’s future, there is a preliminary plan to renew its work within the framework of its own budget). Novyny chief correspondent Yehor Soboliev also disputes the version that Mr. Kolomiyets had obtained some important information. It is simply not the kind of structure through which one could possibly arrange an information leak, believes late Mr. Kolomiyets’s colleague.
Kolomiyets’s colleagues are still unaware why he left precisely for Belarus. However, they believe that a criminal case should also be filed in Ukraine, and that an independent expert examination should be held in addition to the regular one.
The term between the day the body was discovered (October 30) and buried (November 11), according to the preliminary data quoted by Yehor Soboliev, is precisely the term during which an unidentified body should not be buried. Recall that it was still unidentified at the moment it was buried. The chief correspondent has certain questions connected with the fact that Molodechno (the Belarus district center near which the body was discovered) is a rather big town not far from Minsk where an active search was conducted. In spite of the fact that, according to Mr. Soboliev, Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Yury Smyrnov sent his Belarusian counterpart at least two telegrams requesting assistance, the body was not identified and was buried. The correspondent stressed one other important detail: Mykhailo Kolomiyets was a well-dressed and respectable man; one could hardly mistake him for, say, a drunk.
When the press conference was over, a press release was delivered to The Day saying that on November 20 late Kolomiyets’s relatives identified his body. The Day will follow this situation further.
