Kuchma Decade of Suspicious Deaths in Ukraine

KIEV, Ukraine -- Dozens of prominent Ukrainian politicians, businessmen and journalists have died under suspicious circumstances in the past decade. Most of these deaths occured during Kuchma's watch.

March 1999: Vyacheslav Chornovyl, a member of parliament, dies when his car crashes into a truck. He was planning to stand against President Leonid Kuchma in the presidential elections.

September 2000: Georgiy Gongadze, an Internet reporter who investigated top-level corruption, is abducted in Kiev. His decapitated body is found in a forest nearby, though his head has never been found. A former bodyguard to the President makes secret tape recordings that allegedly link Kuchma to the killing.

January 2001: Oleksandr Yemets, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who was reportedly involved in the scandal over the Kuchma tapes, dies when his car swerves into a ditch.

July 2001: Ihor Oleksandrov, a prominent television journalist, is beaten to death outside his office building in the eastern Donetsk region by unknown assailants.

March 2002: Valery Malev, the head of an arms export company, dies in a car crash after apparently falling asleep at the wheel. Opposition MPs say he and President Kuchma were involved in illegal arms deals and that the car had been tampered with.

August 2003: Ihor Honcharov, a former senior police officer and a key witness in the Gongadze case, is beaten to death in prison. An investigation launched in 2004 has produced no conclusive results so far.

December 2004: Transport minister Heorhiy Kyrpa found dead from a gunshot wound in his summer house outside Kiev. Police say he committed suicide, but the opposition claims he was coerced to kill himself. It is believed he had skimmed off considerable sums of public money and the fraud was about to be exposed.

March 4, 2005: Yuriy Kravchenko, the former interior minister, found dead in his summer house outside Kiev, hours before he was to appear for questioning about Mr Gongadze's killing.