Prosecutor-General calls for punishing falsifiers

The Prosecutor-General’s Office of Ukraine is still making efforts to trace the plotters of the murder of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze and to track down Oleksiy Pukach, former chief of the Interior Ministry’s external surveillance department, said Prosecutor-General Oleksandr Medvedko at a Kyiv press conference last Tuesday. “An investigative operations group continues to work in order to identify the plotters and determine the whereabouts of Pukach,” Medvedko said. He expressed regret that “there is not enough evidence at the moment to be able to say where Pukach is — in Russia or somewhere else.” In Medvedko’s view, if they manage to apprehend Pukach, “there will be considerable progress” in this criminal case. Commenting on the trial of those accused of committing the murder, he said it is “the court’s prerogative” to hold an in-camera trial. The prosecutor-general also added that he supports this decision because the proceedings may reveal information that constitutes a state secret.

Medvedko also told journalists that the Prosecutor-General’s Office has no criminal case against the former head of the State Property Fund Mykhailo Chechetov: it is only conducting a pre-investigative check of his testimony to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “On Jan. 18 the Prosecutor-General’s Office of Ukraine received some materials not connected to the criminal case from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. We are checking them and then will decide whether or not to open a criminal case,” Medvedko said. He added that Chechetov was questioned as a witness in another criminal case. The prosecutor-general refused to go into the details of this case because the court has not made any decision.

Medvedko also considers it crucial to solve all the crimes related to the rigging of the 2004 presidential election before this year’s parliamentary election. “It is necessary to complete — before the parliamentary election — the investigation of the crimes committed with respect to the previous, presidential one,” Interfax-Ukraine quotes the prosecutor-general as saying during last Tuesday’s coordination meeting of top-ranking law-enforcement officers. Medvedko said he is “not satisfied with the attempts to track down some officials, including Zasukha, Bodelan, and Vartsaba (former head of the Kyiv Regional Administration, former mayor of Odesa, and ex-chief of police of Zakarpattia oblast, respectively — Ed.), his first deputy Rusin, and others.” The prosecutor-general also believes that punishment should be meted out to some high-ranking officials, now on the wanted list, who are guilty of abuse of power, embezzlement of budget funds, and misappropriation of public property. In his turn, Oleksandr Bondarenko, First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, who attended the coordination meeting, emphasized, “The Russian side demonstratively does not carry out search operations.”