The Annals of Unsolved Crime by Edward Jay Epstein

Author:Edward Jay Epstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781612190495
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2013-02-25T13:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

CRIMES OF STATE

CHAPTER 22

DEATH IN UKRAINE: THE CASE OF

THE HEADLESS JOURNALIST

I.

A journalist is decapitated in Ukraine. The president of Ukraine is implicated in the murder by secret tape recordings. The Minister of the Interior supposedly commits suicide by shooting himself in the head, using two shots. The Minister’s two top deputies are eliminated as witnesses, the first by a fatal heart attack, the second as the result of a coma that leaves him brain-dead. The government itself is destabilized by the release of the secret recordings of the president, which are posted on a website financed by a Russian billionaire exiled in London. Intertwined in the case of the headless journalist are four separate types of political crime: murder, cover-up, espionage, and coup d’état.

The murder took place in 2000 outside Ukraine’s capital city, Kiev. The victim was Georgiy Gongadze, the thirty-one-year-old Georgian-born editor who co-founded Ukrayinska Pravda (“Ukrainian Truth”), a website created earlier that year, which conducted relentless attacks on Leonid Kuchma, who in 1996, after serving as prime minister, had been elected president. Ukraine, Europe’s second-largest country, was still politically fragile, having only become independent of Russia nine years earlier.

Gongadze was not the first Ukrainian journalist to disappear or die under suspicious circumstances during the Kuchma regime, but his death was immediately considered suspicious because he had published an open letter complaining of harassment by the domestic security service, known by its Russian initials as the SBU, shortly before his disappearance. When he was reported missing on September 17, 2000, a large crowd, led by journalists carrying placards with Gongadze’s photograph on them, occupied Kiev’s main square. These demonstrations grew to more than 100,000 protesters, effectively paralyzing the government of Ukraine.

Then, on November 3, 2000, a headless body was found in a shallow grave in a forest forty-three miles from Kiev. What remained of the corpse had been badly disfigured by dioxin, which pathologists concluded may have been poured on the victim while he was still alive. The corpse then inexplicably vanished from the custody of the local police and only later re-emerged in a morgue in Kiev, along with some of Gongadze’s personal effects. A subsequent DNA analysis performed by a U.S. military lab determined with 99.6 percent certainty that it was the remains of Gongadze. Witness testimony also established that he had been kidnapped from Kiev, after dining with a female friend on September 16, 2000.

Initially, police attributed the murder to common criminals, eventually arresting a suspect, who died in custody, but on November 28, Oleksandr Moroz, the leader of the main opposition party, made public the contents of stolen tape recordings that purported to be the secret deliberations of Kuchma and his cabinet. In one of these tapes, a voice sounding like President Kuchma can be heard discussing Gongadze. It said “Throw him out! Give him to the Chechens!” This sensational disclosure undermined the regime of President Kuchma and eventually made him a suspect in Gongadze’s murder.

The “Cassette Scandal,” as it was called, convulsed the nation for the next five years.

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