KIEV, Ukraine – Ukrainian authorities have arrested a former government official who had been at large for nine years and charged with the slaying of an investigative journalist, officials said Wednesday.
The decapitated body of Heorhiy Gongadze was found outside Kiev several months after his disappearance in September 2000.
Police charged four suspects in his killing. Three of them, former police officers, were convicted of murder last year. Two received 12-year prison sentences and the third got 13 years.
The National Security Service said in a statement that its agents arrested the fourth — Oleksiy Pukach, who was working as the chief of the Interior Ministry's surveillance department at the time of the killing — in central Ukraine late Tuesday.
In September 2000, Gongadze got into what he thought was a taxi, and was then joined by three others and driven outside Kiev. He was beaten and strangled, his body doused with gasoline and burned. Experts said Gongadze was decapitated after his death. Numerous tests have concluded the remains are Gongadze's. His head has not been found.
Prosecutors believe that Pukach organized Gongadze's killing with the help of the three former police officers, and then personally strangled Gongadze, said Yuriy Boichenko, a spokesman for the Prosecutor General's Office.
Gongadze exposed high-profile corruption in his stories, and his killing caused an uproar and months of protests against then-President Leonid Kuchma after a key witness released tape recordings in which voices resembling those of Kuchma and others were heard conspiring against Gongadze.
Gongadze's family believes the true masterminds of the killing are still at large.
The Gongadze case remains a major test for President Viktor Yushchenko, who has pledged to bring the killers to justice.