Cassette Scandal

, journalist, founder of a popular Internet newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda, who was kidnapped and murdered in 2000. Georgiy Gongadze, the editor of a Ukrainian internet newspaper which focused on corruption, disappeared on 16 September 2000. This produced growing pressure on Ukraine's president Kuchma, who promised to personally oversee the investigation into Gongadze's disappearance. On 3 November a decapitated corpse was discovered not far from Kyiv. As the body had been doused with acid, it was impossible to establish the persona of the deceased through fingerprint analysis, however friends and relatives identified the body as belonging to Gongadze. ==Scandal==

Publication of the recordings The scandal started on 28November 2000, in Kyiv, when Oleksandr Moroz, head of the opposition Socialist Party of Ukraine, publicly accused Kuchma of involvement in the abduction of Georgiy Gongadze and numerous other crimes, presenting records of the president's conversations with senior officials as evidence. Moroz named Kuchma's former bodyguard, Mykola Melnychenko, as the source of the records. ==Authenticity of the recordings==

Dutch experts reportedly confirmed, that the tapes had no traces of editing or other alterations, but it was impossible to prove that the voice in them belonged to the president. ==Legacy==

, near the location where his body had been discovered in November 2000 Many figures of the scandal remained influential in Ukrainian politics. The case was directly connected with the political career of Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine's prime minister at the time. Oleksander Moroz concluded an alliance with Yushchenko, resulting in the reformation of Ukraine's constitution (in favor of the parliament). Hundreds of politicians and activists taking part in the 2001 protests led the 2004 Orange Revolution. Yushchenko led the revolution after the presidential election, and became president on 23 January 2005. Mykola Melnychenko (who received U.S. political asylum) released new portions of his recordings. In 2004, Volodymyr Tsvil, a Ukrainian businessman who assisted Melnychenko in his escape, publicly accused him of not revealing certain details of the case and trying to sell the audio archive to Kuchma's aides. Melnychenko visited Ukraine in 2005 to release new allegation details, but has not disclosed any details of his possible eavesdropping operation. The criminal investigation regarding the circumstances of Melnychenko's records and Georgiy Gongadze's death remains inconclusive despite a mass of information revealed by numerous journalistic investigations. Melnychenko's recordings were declared evidence when Kuchma was charged with abuse of office and giving illegal orders to Interior Ministry officials; a criminal case into the murder of Gongadze was opened against Kuchma on 21 March 2011. A Ukrainian district court ordered prosecutors to drop criminal charges against Kuchma on 14 December 2011 on grounds that evidence linking him to the murder of Gongadze was insufficient. The court rejected Melnychenko's recordings as evidence. ==See also==