Murder sparked Ukraine revolution

Leonid Kuchma

KIEV - Three policemen have gone on trial over the murder of one of Ukraine's best-known investigative reporters.

The trial has been eagerly awaited as political fallout from the murder of Georgiy Gongadze in 2000 played a key role in ending the 10-year autocratic rule of Leonid Kuchma.

Outrage over Gongadze's murder and the authorities' inability to solve it set the stage for the Orange Revolution of 2004, during which protesters brandished placards demanding to know the truth about what happened.

A parliamentary commission last year concluded that Kuchma and other officials had masterminded his abduction, pointing to the fact that they had been secretly taped by a bodyguard discussing how best "to take care of" Gongadze.

Gongadze, 31, was investigating corruption in the Kuchma regime at the time of his murder and had made a name for himself as an anti-government reporter at the internet newspaper Ukrainskaya Pravda.

He was abducted in September 2000 and his body was found two months later. He had been beaten, strangled, burned and then decapitated.

Mykola Protasov, Valeriy Kostenko and Oleksandr Popovych are charged with premeditated murder and of exceeding their authority. Yuriy Kravchenko, the Interior Minister at the time of Gongadze's murder, who had been implicated in it, killed himself the day before he was due to give testimony to the inquiry.

The case was postponed until January 23 after Protasov was taken ill.

- INDEPENDENT