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Leonid Kuchma   Letter 31   03-Jan-2004   Was Heorhy (Georgi) Gongadze tortured?
  Leonid Kuchma George-Soros-installed President of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma
"The skinning revealed the leg muscles like in an anatomical illustration, and suggested that sadists had been at work." � Coroner Ihor Vorotyntsev
Beheaded: The Killing of a Journalist can be purchased from Artemia Press Ltd at (www.artemiapress.co.uk).  Please enquire at [email protected] concerning how you might support the Ukrainian-language version of Beheaded � revised, updated, and expanded � which is sorely needed to help inform Ukrainian voters in this year of presidential elections.

          03 January 2004


Leonid Kuchma, President
vul. Bankivska 11
Kyiv, 252005
Ukraine


Leonid Kuchma:

The following information raises the question of whether Internet journalist Heorhy (Georgi) Gongadze was tortured prior to being murdered:

The Tarashcha coroner, Ihor Vorotyntsev, began the autopsy on the body on Friday, the day of discovery, and had it ready on Monday, November 6.  By law, the local prosecutor should have witnessed the autopsy, but he was not present.  After the coroner hosed and cleaned the earth off, he found a relatively fresh, headless, naked, partially skinned body, decaying on the extremities of the fingers and toes.  While decay on the extremities was normal for a fresh corpse, the skinning of the legs and forearms shocked him.  "The skinning revealed the leg muscles like in an anatomical illustration, and suggested that sadists had been at work," he surmised.
JV Koshiw, Beheaded: The Killing of a Journalist, Artemia Press Ltd (www.artemiapress.co.uk), Reading England, 2003, pp. 125-126.

One would expect that Ukrainian pathologists and forensics experts would have photographs of Gongadze's body which would throw light on the Vorotyntsev allegation of skinning.  Your publishing such photographs would help move the question of torture outside the realm of speculation.

External Link to The Reporters Without Frontiers Impunity Black List  
Taking the above together with the torture-murder on the night of 7-8 July 1997 of Volodymyr Katelnytsky and his 81-year-old mother, Lykeria, who died of 21 stab wounds, one might wonder whether Stalinist torturers continue to find employment even in independent Ukraine, and whether among Ukraine's most urgent tasks is coming into compliance with the October 2001 United Nations Committee Against Torture demand that the Ukrainian government "ensure that all allegations of torture are thoroughly investigated by an independent authority, all guilty parties brought to trial and all victims suitably compensated" (Reporters Without Frontiers Impunity Black List ( www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=2777).





Lubomyr Prytulak

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