Imitating investigation into Gongadze’s murder

Valentina Telychenko, the lawyer representing Georgy Gongadze’s widow has told Deutsche Welle that she does not anticipate a speeding up of the investigation into the murder of the journalist following the conclusions of the expert opinion on the Melnychenko tapes.

She explains that the conclusions of the expert opinion are material of the investigation which are not to be divulged, and therefore former major of the State Guard Mykola Melnychenko cannot know anything about the results of the expert assessment.

Furthermore, it is unclear precisely what material was sent for an expert assessment to Germany and what questions were put to the experts.

Ms Telychenko is convinced that whatever the results of the assessment are, they will have no impact on the course of the investigation since the recordings themselves cannot be used as evidence in court as they were obtained by unlawful means.

“Nobody at the present time doubts that there are conversations in President Kuchma’s office on the Melnychenko tapes. However that does not endanger those who ordered Gongadze’s murder”, she stated.

She added that the tapes of which an expert assessment was carried out was merely help to the investigators in determining the direction of the investigation.

However if the Prosecutor’s Office did not previously work in those directions, then “I don’t see how something could change today and the prosecutor would begin to investigate the tapes.”

She also believes that Melnychenko is seeking publicity on the results of the expert assessment, while the noise over the recordings is, in her view, “one of the aspects of imitating a criminal investigation intp who ordered and organized the murder of Gongadze.”

On Thursday the Prosecutor General’s Office announced that it had received the results of a phonoscopic expert assessment of the Melnychenko tapes carried out in Germany. At the moment they are being studied and translated from English.

Melnychenko has already declared that he is certain that the German experts have found the tapes to be authentic. He also claims that the fragments analyzed not only hold elements of the preparation of Gongadze’s murder, but also “conversations which reveal the rigging of election results, for example, in 1999.”