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Outspoken Journalist Killed in Car Bombing in Kiev
| Wall Street Journal | - |
MOSCOW—A
bomb ripped through a car and killed journalist Pavel Sheremet in the
Ukrainian capital of Kiev on Wednesday morning, the most high-profile
slaying of a journalist in the country in more than 15 years.
Outspoken Journalist Killed in Car Bombing in Kiev
Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko vows thorough investigation, asks FBI for help
ENLARGE
Police experts in Kiev inspect the car in which a bomb killed journalist Pavel Sheremet on Wednesday.
Photo:
Zuma Press
President Petro Poroshenko ordered a prompt investigation into the killing of Mr. Sheremet, a 44-year-old Belarusian who worked for the investigative-news site Ukrainska Pravda, or Ukrainian Truth.
An explosion rocked the car in which Mr. Sheremet was traveling around 7:45 a.m. in central Kiev. Photos from the scene showed a burned red sport-utility vehicle with its windows blown out and debris spread across the street. Ukrainska Pravda said the car belonged to its co-founder and Mr. Sheremet’s partner, Olena Prytula, although she wasn’t in the car at the time.
ENLARGE
A portrait of Pavel Sheremet is surrounded with flowers and candles near where he was killed in Kiev on Wednesday.
Photo:
Associated Press
Ukrainian General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko said the killing could have been motivated by Mr. Sheremet’s professional activities or could be an attempt “to destabilize the situation in the center of the capital.”
Mr. Poroshenko noted a recent increase in clashes in the country’s east, where government forces are fighting Russian-backed militants.
“We must not forget that the country is defending itself from the Russian aggressor and the best sons of Ukraine are giving their lives at the front,” he said. “We won’t allow anyone to open a second front within the country.”
The U.S. Embassy in Kiev said it “welcome[d] the statements by the police and prosecutor general that the circumstances surrounding his murder will be fully investigated and any perpetrators brought to justice.”
In two decades working in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, Mr. Sheremet won a reputation as a crusading journalist committed to free speech.
As a television reporter in authoritarian Belarus, he was detained in 1997 and later handed a suspended sentence for allegedly crossing the Belarus border illegally while filming a report on smuggling. He later worked in Moscow for state television channels, leaving one project in 2014 saying he was hounded out for his balanced reporting on Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.
In recent years, he worked in Ukraine—where media is much freer than in its authoritarian neighbors—for Ukrainska Pravda and on radio and television shows.
Ukrainska Pravda, Ukraine’s most famous investigative website, has for years riled politicians, government officials and tycoons with its piercing investigations into their dealings. It shot to attention in 2000, when its co-founder, Georgiy Gongadze, was kidnapped and beheaded. A court convicted a police officer of carrying out the killing in 2013 but didn’t establish who ordered the murder. People close to Mr. Gongadze have long accused the former president, Leonid Kuchma, of involvement, citing tape recordings made by one of Mr. Kuchma’s bodyguards. The former president denied any involvement in the killing.
Journalists in Kiev said the murder of Mr. Sheremet looked like an effort to scare them.
“It’s an attempt to return self-censorship to journalists and to warn everyone who resolves to investigate brazen theft and giant financial machinations, all the things that prevent Ukraine from escaping its feudal system,” wrote Vitaliy Sych, editor of news magazine Novoye Vremya, or New Time, in an online commentary.
Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com
