Body parts found in Ukraine may be of murdered reporter

UKRAINIAN INVESTIGATORS believe they have found skull fragments belonging to journalist Georgy Gongadze, a week after the arrest of a former top police official who is suspected of involvement in his murder and decapitation nine years ago.

Prosecutors said the pieces of bone were found in a village outside the capital, Kiev, in a location indicated by Olexiy Pukach, a former general who led the interior ministry’s surveillance department when Gongadze disappeared in September 2000.

Mr Pukach was arrested in rural northern Ukraine last week, six years after disappearing while under investigation for the journalist’s murder.

Gongadze’s articles, exposing corruption among Ukraine’s elite, earned him the wrath of some of the country’s most powerful people.

A police spokesman said just hours after his arrest he had agreed to reveal where Gongadze’s missing head was buried and to name the senior state officials who had ordered him to be killed. Mr Pukach’s lawyer denies he made those pledges, however.

Many Ukrainians believe the order came from former president Leonid Kuchma, after a one-time bodyguard aired what he claimed were tape recordings of his boss complaining about the journalist and demanding that he be “dealt with”. Mr Kuchma denies all involvement in the killing, while other key people suspected of involvement in the case have subsequently died or disappeared.

Public anger at the gruesome fate of Gongadze, and Mr Kuchma’s abject failure to find his killers, helped fuel the 2004 Orange Revolution, which brought pro-western leaders to power.

The skull fragments are now being tested by Ukrainian specialists, but a lawyer for Gongadze’s widow has demanded that foreign experts examine the remains, such is the general level of mistrust of the local authorities and the extreme political sensitivity of the case.