WP: Ukraine's Ex-Interior Minister Found Dead (another REPORTER dead)

(carbon copy of the bush* approach to the media....stall, delay, pretend to be investigating, and if all else fails: suicide them)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7029-2005Mar4.html


Ukraine's Ex-Interior Minister Found Dead
Former Official Was to Be Questioned in Case of Murdered Journalist

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 4, 2005; 4:17 PM

-snips-

MOSCOW, March 4 -- Ukraine’s former interior minister was found dead Friday morning in an apparent suicide just hours before he was to meet with prosecutors looking into the murder of an investigative reporter in September 2000.

The gangland-style slaying of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze, 31, whose decapitated body was found in a forest about 70 miles from Kiev, has long been the subject of allegations linked to the government of former president Leonid Kuchma.

Senior government officials, including Kuchma, were implicated in the killing when Socialist Party Leader Oleksander Moroz said he possessed audio tapes secretly recorded by a member of the president’s security detail and played them to parliament in 2000.

Progress on a case that had laid dormant under the Kuchma administration, despite a series of ostensible investigations, has accelerated dramatically since Viktor Yushchenko became president in January.

The death by gunshot of Yuri Kravchenko, 53, at his home Friday followed an announcement earlier this week by Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Svyatoslav Piskun that investigators had identified the four people immediately involved in the kidnapping and killing of Gongadze.