Killers caught

last updated 8 January 2015

Kiev, Ukraine

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said this week that police had arrested three men in connection with the murder of a prominent journalist. The assassination of Georgiy Gongadze, whose headless body was discovered in 2000, galvanized the democratic opposition against then president Leonid Kuchma. At the time he disappeared, Gongadze had been investigating alleged corruption in the Kuchma administration, and a presidential bodyguard claimed that Kuchma himself had ordered the killing. But Kuchma denied it, and the investigation was dropped. Yushchenko, who was elected after the peaceful “Orange Revolution,” last year, said the killers were members of the security forces. “The former authorities not only lacked the political will to solve this murder,” he said, “they covered up for the murderers.”