Ukrainian Communist Leader Demands Kuchma be Taken Into Custody

KIEV, Ukraine -- Leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Petro Simonenko, has demanded that the country’s former President Leonid Kuchma and some former government officials be taken to custody.

“Mysterious death of the former Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko proves the half-baked political statements about final solution of the murder of journalists Gongadze cover up a purposeful destruction of evidence and the people directly involved in that crime as executors or witnesses,” Simonenko said.

“The Prosecutor General’s Office and the State Security Service must take to custody Leonid Kuchma and other former and incumbent top officials featured in the case,” he said. “Their lives must be saved, the Gongadze case must be submitted to court, and the judges must be able to issue a verdict on it”.

Grigory Omelchenko, the chief of a parliamentary commission for investigating “resounding criminal cases”, said Kuchma and several other officials had been accomplices in the crime at different stages.

“Its co-organizers and accomplices are Leonid Kuchma, former chief of the presidential administration staff Vladimir Litvin, who is now the speaker of the Supreme Rada, former interior minister Kravchenko, who was found at his dacha with a gunshot wound this morning, and former director of the State Security Service Leonid Derkach,” Omelchenko said.

Kiev-based pro-democratic Channel Five also quoted him as saying the Security Service experts had found out Kuchma had told Derkach July 29, 2000, something should be done about Gongadze.

“On the same day, Derkach ordered to begin a criminal case for ‘operative development’ of journalist Gongadze,” Omelchenko said.

“Gongadze was labelled as ‘a provocateur’ in the materials and the chief judge of the City of Kiev issued a sanction to open technical surveillance of the man,” he said.

Andrei Fedura, a lawyer representing Gongadze’s mother Lesya, said Kravchenko could not have committed suicide.

“He was not the man who put period to his own life that way,” Fedura said. “This is nonsense”.

“That’s just an attempt to blur out all the traces, to make Kravchenko the scapegoat of that situation and to eliminate the problem,” he said.

“I don’t think this is the last such development in that story,” Fedura said.

“The problem is Kravnchenko could have called into the Prosecutor’s Office Friday and put all the right accents in the Gongadze murder case,” he indicated.