Ukraine drops murder case against Kuchma

A Ukrainian court on Wednesday dropped a criminal case against former president Leonid Kuchma into accusations he ordered the brutal murder of critical journalist Georgy Gongadze in 2000. The Pechersky district court in the Ukrainian capital Kiev annulled the criminal probe after an appeal by the legal team of Kuchma, who was president from 1994-2005, the Interfax news agency said. Prosecutors earlier this year charged Kuchma with involvement in the murder -- Ukraine's most notorious post-Soviet crime -- after years of pressure from the journalist's supporters. However the legal process appeared to stall later in the year although the former president was formally questioned as a suspect and the suspected killer named Kuchma in court as the mastermind of the murder. Earlier this year, the trial opened of former interior ministry official Olexy Pukach who was arrested in July 2009 and prosecutors have said he has confessed to personally strangling Gongadze in a forest outside Kiev. In a court hearing on August 30, he accused Kuchma and three other officials including current parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn of ordering the killing. Kuchma and Lytvyn have always denied the charges. But Gongadze's supporters point to tapes recorded by a former bodyguard of Kuchma -- Mykola Melnychenko -- where voices alleged to be of the former president and Lytvyn are heard speaking about eliminating Gongadze. The tapes, whose publication in 2000 prompted mass protests in Ukraine, contain a voice resembling that of Kuchma suggesting to have Gongadze "kidnapped by Chechens". They were initially accepted as evidence in the case but Wednesday's ruling by judge Galina Suprun said that they were inadmissible as the recordings had been obtained by illegal means. "The only basis for opening the criminal case was the audio tapes," she said. "But the accusation cannot be based on evidence that was obtained through illegal means." Her decision was in line with a ruling by the Ukrainian constitutional court in October that accusations could not be based on evidence obtained through means deemed to be illegal. Gongadze was the founder of the Ukrainska Pravda news site that was bitterly critical of Kuchma and the investigation into his murder is seen by the West as a test of Ukraine's commitment to media freedom.