From: [email protected]
Subject: RFE/RL Organized Crime and Terrorism Watch Vol. 5, No. 2, 4 March 2005
Date: March 4, 2005 9:51:15 AM CST
RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
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RFE/RL Organized Crime and Terrorism Watch
Vol. 5, No. 2, 4 March 2005
Reporting on Crime, Corruption, and Terrorism in the former USSR,
Eastern Europe, and the Middle East
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HEADLINES:
* PROFILE: YURIY KRAVCHENKO
* POLICE OFFICERS ARRESTED IN GONGADZE CASE
* THE THREAT OF BIOTERRORISM
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UKRAINE
PROFILE: YURIY KRAVCHENKO
By Roman Kupchinsky
Former Ukrainian Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko was found
dead in his country home on 4 March, just hours before he was to
appear before prosecutors for questioning related to his possible
involvement in the death of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze in September 2000.
Kravchenko was regarded as a key figure in the Gongadze case
and was implicated in the killing based on tapes purportedly
containing private conversations with then President Leonid Kuchma.
The Interior Ministry's public-relations department told
ITAR-TASS on 4 March that a forensic examination will be conducted to "find out whether it was a murder or suicide."
Inna Kisel, a spokeswoman for newly appointed Interior
Minister Yuriy Lutsenko, said Kravchenko's death appeared to be
suicide.
ITAR-TASS cited an unidentified source participating in the
investigation into the death as saying Kravchenko took his own life
at 8:45 a.m. local time. Kravchenko was to appear at the
Prosecutor-General's Office for questioning at 10 a.m.
"Yet, this is merely a version," the news agency quoted the
source as saying.
Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Svyatoslav Piskun announced at a
2 March news conference on developments in the Gongadze murder case that Kravchenko had been summoned for questioning.
Audio recordings purportedly made in Kuchma's office by a
member of the presidential security detail, Mykola Melnychenko,
contain conversations in which a voice alleged to be Kravchenko's
is heard discussing Gongadze.
Hryhoriy Omelchenko, a member of parliament's commission
investigating Gongadze's killing, told the media on 3 March that
Kravchenko and former President Leonid Kuchma should be arrested
immediately.
Omelchenko also said he was fearful that Kravchenko might
take his own life, as he was under extreme pressure.
Kravchenko was appointed interior minister by then President
Kuchma on 3 July 1995.
Kuchma removed Kravchenko from leadership of the Interior
Ministry on 27 March 2001 and eventually appointed him head of the Ukrainian Tax Administration.
Kravchenko, born on 5 March 1951 in Ukraine's Kirovohrad
Oblast, is survived by his wife and two daughters.
POLICE OFFICERS ARRESTED IN GONGADZE CASE
By Roman Kupchinsky
Ukraine's prosecutor-general said on 2 March that two
senior police officers were arrested in connection with the 2000
murder of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze. Prosecutor-General Svyatoslav Piskun said the two officers are police colonels.
The day before, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko
announced that authorities have solved the Gongadze murder case, and accused former President Leonid Kuchma's government of covering up the case.
"The killers of Heorhiy Gongadze have been found and
arrested," Yushchenko said on 1 March, quickly adding that the
"former regime acted as the umbrella, protecting the killers."
Interfax reported that Yushchenko pointed to former
Prosecutor-General Hennadiy Vasilyev as a man "whose mission was not to solve this case."
For 4 1/2 years, Ukrainian law enforcement agencies were
unable, unwilling, or forbidden to find the persons responsible for
the killing of Gongadze, an Internet journalist whose website
"Ukrayinska pravda" had been exposing corruption at the highest
levels of the Ukrainian government.
(((That's right, he died for a website.)))
Gongadze disappeared on the night of 16 September 2000 and
was never seen alive again. In November that year, a badly
decomposed, headless corpse was found buried in a narrow trench in a village outside Kyiv. Belated DNA tests proved the corpse to be
Gongadze's.
Kuchmagate
Later that month, the head of the Socialist Party, Oleksandr
Moroz, told a session of parliament that he was in possession of
recordings made in the offices of then President Leonid Kuchma by a
member of his security detail, Major Mykola Melnychenko. The
recordings, Moroz said, strongly indicated that Kuchma was involved
in planning Gongadze's abduction. In parliament, Moroz played the
tapes, which appeared to be recordings of Kuchma talking to a person identified as then Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko and telling Kravchenko, among other things, to have "Gongadze removed and thrown to the Chechens."
A voice believed to be Kravchenko's is heard telling
Kuchma that his "Eagles" are ready to do anything to Gongadze that
Kuchma orders them to.
The "Melnychenko tapes," as they came to be called, sparked
the gravest political crisis of Kuchma's presidency. Hours upon
hours of conversations appeared to reveal wrongdoings at the very top of the government. These revelations led to the "Ukraine without
Kuchma" movement and eventually to the "Orange Revolution" of 2004.
From the very beginning of the "Kuchmagate" scandal, as the
Ukrainian press dubbed it, Kuchma denied ever having spoken to
Kravchenko and others about Gongadze and claimed that he did not know the journalist. He promptly issued a statement that he had placed the Gongadze investigation under his personal supervision and would see to it that the guilty were found and punished.
However, by 2003 Melnychenko had been granted refugee status in the United States, where he hired a private audio verification laboratory, Bek Tek, to analyze the segments of the recordings dealing with Gongadze. Bek Tek concluded that the recordings were authentic and had not been tampered with and that the voices were those of Kuchma and Kravchenko. The owner of Bek Tek, Bruce Koening, had been an FBI audio verification expert for many years and his company had done similar verifications for the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous other organizations.
In response to Bek Tek's findings, the Ukrainian
Prosecutor-General's Office conducted its own authentication of a
copy of the same conversation and declared that it was a fake, a
montage of voices, and could not be placed in evidence.
Little Progress
In autumn 2003, Svyatoslav Piskun replaced Mykhaylo Potebenko as prosecutor-general and promtply vowed to solve the Gongadze murder case in six months. Piskun, despite suspicions by the Gongadze family that he was covering up the investigation, did manage to make considerable headway in the case and interrogated a number of Interior Ministry (MVD) officers who described how higher-level MVD officials had ordered that Gongadze be followed and then destroyed the evidence of this surveillance. These officers told investigators from the Prosecutor-General's Office that the orders to follow Gongadze had come "from the very top" of the MVD and that high-level officers supervised the operation.
These revelations led Piskun to arrest MVD General Oleksiy
Pukach on suspicion of having ordered Gongadze followed and after the killing, of ordering the destruction of evidence about this
surveillance.
Shortly after Pukach's arrest, Kuchma fired Piskun.
Unexplained allegations were made by the SBU and the President's
Council on Combating Corruption that Piskun had "embezzled funds".
After a few months, Kuchma appointed Piskun deputy head of the
National Defense and Security Council. He was never prosecuted for
his alleged "embezzling."
Kuchma then appointed Hennadiy Vasilyev as
prosecutor-general. Vasilyev, a political supporter of Kuchma,
promptly had Pukach released from prison after making him sign a
statement that he would not leave the country.
As prosecutor-general, Vasilyev did not seem to make any
headway in investigating the case. This lack of activity led many in
Ukraine to suspect that he was deliberately covering up the case and
protecting those who might have been implicated.
When information was leaked to the British newspaper "The
Independent" in June 2004 about how the MVD destroyed documents in the case, Vasilyev ordered an investigation into the leak and brought in the British journalist for questioning.
Orange Revolution
Vasilyev was fired by Kuchma as part of an agreement with
parliament to hold a rerun of the second round of elections in
December 2004. The opposition had been demanding his removal for some time and Kuchma was forced to concede on this matter and reappointed Piskun to his old post.
After Yushchenko was inaugurated in January, Piskun was
allowed to remain as prosecutor-general. But the new president
reportedly asked the SBU and the MVD, now headed by his supporters, to probe the Gongadze case properly and find those responsible.
By this time, Pukach had disappeared and was placed on a
wanted list while former MVD head Kravchenko was rumored to have fled the country, although no arrest warrant was apparently issued for him. Kuchma left Ukraine in the second part of February for Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic for a vacation.
By late February, the newly invigorated investigation began
producing results. On 1 March, Yushchenko announced that the SBU had arrested the killers of Gongadze on 28 February and that they were cooperating with investigators, although he did not name the arrested suspects. Interfax reported on 1 March that two men had been arrested and one surrendered to the police himself. Two of the men were colonels and one a general of the MVD.
Yushchenko told a news conference in Kyiv on 1 March that the
Kuchma government had protected the killers and reiterated his
earlier promise to find those "who had ordered the killing" and bring
them to justice along with the actual murderers.
At the close of his press briefing Yushchenko said the time
had finally come to bury the remains of Heorhiy Gongadze, which have been lying in a Kyiv morgue for four and a half years.
(((I wonder how long this guy's smoldering, beheaded,
gasoline-soaked, deck-punching Banquo ghost
will haunt the halls of Ukrainian power.)))
