KIEV, Ukraine -- A fugitive top policeman charged in the murder of an investigative reporter in Ukraine that triggered a protracted political crisis has been arrested, Ukrainian security forces said Wednesday.
Senior officials said they hoped the arrest Tuesday evening of Oleksiy Pukach would shed light on who ordered the 2000 murder of Georgy Gongadze, head of an internet news agency highly critical of then-president Leonid Kuchma.Pukach, a former general and top interior ministry official, had been on the run since 2003. He was charged in absentia with the murder of Gongadze, whose headless corpse was found outside Kiev two months after he disappeared in September 2000.President Viktor Yushchenko established as a top priority the solving of Gongadze's murder after being swept to power by pro-Western "Orange Revolution" rallies in 2004.Three policemen were arrested soon after and last year were sentenced to long prison terms. But it has not been established who ordered the murder."I believe this time it will not be underlings brought to justice, but those who ordered the murder," Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko told reporters after a cabinet meeting.Yushchenko's spokeswoman said prosecutors believed Pukach had been in charge of a unit of police that tracked the reporter's movements before he was killed.Tapes produced by the speaker of Ukraine's parliament, Oleksander Moroz, purported to show that Kuchma as president had ordered the reporter's murder in discussions in his office.But Kuchma, accused by the opposition and rights groups of hobbling the independent media, denied the allegations and his involvement was never proven.Yuri Kravchenko, the interior minister of the time also implicated by the tapes. He was found shot dead at his country home, in what investigators said was a suicide, within days of Yushchenko vowing to punish those behind the murder.
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