Disappearance and initial investigations Gongadze disappeared on the night of 16 September 2000, after failing to return home. Foul play was suspected from the outset. The matter immediately attracted widespread public attention and media interest. Eighty journalists signed an open letter to Kuchma urging an investigation and complaining that "during the years of Ukrainian independence, not a single high-profile crime against journalists has been fully resolved". Kuchma responded by ordering an immediate inquiry. This inquiry however, was viewed with scepticism. Opposition politician
Hryhoriy Omelchenko stated that the disappearance had coincided with Gongadze receiving documents on corruption within the president's own entourage. The
Verkhovna Rada set up a parallel inquiry run by a special commission. Neither investigation produced any results. Two months later, on 3 November 2000, a body was found in a forest in the
Tarashcha Raion of
Kyiv Oblast, some outside Kyiv, near the city of
Tarashcha. The corpse had been decapitated and doused in acid, apparently to make identification more difficult; forensic investigations found that the acid bath and decapitation had occurred while the victim was still alive. The Russian-edited, Russian-language Ukrainian newspaper
Segodnya ("Today") reported that Gongadze had been abducted by policemen and accidentally shot in the head while seated in a vehicle, necessitating his decapitation (to avoid the bullet being recovered and matched to a police weapon). His body had been doused in petrol which had failed to burn properly, and had then been dumped.
Crime sequence According to materials of the investigation, the murder of Gongadze was ordered by
Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko on 11 September 2000 as a reaction to the journalist's "compromising actions" against Ukraine's political leadership. Gongadze had previously publicly criticized Kravchenko for allegedly not fulfilling his duties as minister in fight against
organized crime. Gongadze was kidnapped by a group of four
police officers headed by Oleksiy Pukach, who had been appointed head of the Chief Directorate of Criminal Investigations two weeks prior. The group had been observing Gongadze's movements for two days before the crime. According to Pukach's subordinates, he hid from them the real goal of the kidnapping, claiming that Gongadze was only to be detained, not murdered. Three months before Pukach had already taken part in the kidnapping and beating of another journalist critical of the government, which was also ordered by a top official of the Interior Ministry. Two weeks after the murder, minister Kravchenko ordered Pukach to rebury Gongadze's body, fearing that the three other accomplices could deliver investigators to the crime site. In early October Pukach dug up the victim's remains and used his service car to transport them to a forest near the city of
Tarashcha, 20 kilometres from the location of the murder. He used an axe to separate Gongadze's head and buried it on a distance of 1.5 kilometres from the rest of the body.
Identification of the body A group of journalists first identified the body as being that of Gongadze, a finding confirmed a few weeks later by his wife Myroslava. In a bizarre twist, the corpse was then confiscated by the
militsiya and resurfaced in a morgue in Kyiv. The authorities did not officially acknowledge that the body was that of Gongadze until the following February and did not definitively confirm it until as late as March 2003. The body was eventually identified and was to be returned to Gongadze's family to be buried two years after his disappearance. However, the funeral never took place. As of 23 June 2006 Gongadze's mother refused to accept the remains offered as it was not the body of her son, sparking a feud with Myroslava. While visiting Kyiv in July 2006, Gongadze's widow Myroslava emphasised that the funeral had now become a solemn family issue and the date of the funeral would soon be appointed.
Political consequences On 28 November 2000, opposition politician
Oleksandr Moroz publicised secret tape recordings which he claimed implicated Kuchma in Gongadze's murder. The recordings were said to be of discussions between Kuchma, presidential chief of staff
Volodymyr Lytvyn, and Interior Minister
Yuriy Kravchenko, and were claimed to have been provided by an unnamed
SBU officer (later named as Major
Mykola Mel'nychenko, Kuchma's bodyguard). The conversations included comments expressing annoyance at Gongadze's writings as well as discussions of ways to shut him up, such as deporting him and arranging for him to be kidnapped and taken to
Chechnya. Killing him was, however, not mentioned and doubt was cast on the tapes' authenticity, as the quality of the recordings was poor. Moroz told the Verkhovna Rada that "the professionally organised disappearance, a slow-moving investigation, disregard for the most essential elements of investigation and incoherent comments by police officials suggest that the case was put together." In September 2001, the American detective agency
Kroll Inc., contracted by the pro-Kuchma political party
Labour Ukraine, carried out a six-month investigation and concluded that Kuchma had nothing to do with the murder of Gongadze. The affair became a major political scandal (referred to in Ukraine as the "
Cassette Scandal" or "Tapegate"). Kuchma strongly denied Moroz's accusations and threatened a
libel suit, blaming the tapes on foreign agents. He later acknowledged that his voice was indeed one of those on the tapes, but claimed that they had been selectively edited to distort his meaning. In November 2005, upon complaint of Gongadze's widow, the
European Court of Human Rights found Ukraine to violate right to life, right to effective remedy and prohibition of degrading treatment. ==Crisis and controversy==