Sergey Dolzhenko/European Pressphoto Agency
Gen. Oleksei Pukach listened to his sentence from the defendant's cage during a court session of the Pechersk district court on charges of murder of the journalist Georgy Gongadze in Kiev, Ukraine, on Tuesday.
MOSCOW — A Ukrainian court sentenced a former security official to life in prison on Tuesday for the death of Georgy Gongadze, a journalist whose mysterious death in 2000 provoked an international outcry and helped set off protests against the president at the time, Leonid D. Kuchma.
The former security official, Gen. Oleksei Pukach, who once headed a surveillance department for Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, testified that he had not intended to kill Mr. Gongadze, but strangled him with a belt accidentally in the course of an interrogation. He is the highest-ranking official to be convicted in Mr. Gongadze’s death.
Mr. Gongadze went missing in September 2000 and his body was found two months later, beheaded, in a forest 75 miles from Kiev, the capital. He had infuriated the president, Mr. Kuchma, with muckraking publications in Ukrainskaya Pravda, an Internet newspaper he had founded.
Suspicions of official involvement grew with the release of covert recordings made by one of Mr. Kuchma’s bodyguards, in which the a man who sounded like the president spoke of Mr. Gongadze, telling a subordinate to “throw him out, give him to the Chechens.”
The killing came to epitomize the role that crime had come to play in Ukrainian politics and provoked a wave of demonstrations that some describe as the first manifestation of the 2004 Orange Revolution.
Three former police officers who stood trial over Mr. Gongadze’s death said that he had climbed into what he believed to be a taxi and was taken to a location outside Kiev, where he was beaten and strangled, doused with gasoline and burned.
General Pukach said he had been trying to force Mr. Gongadze to confess to espionage, something Mr. Gongadze refused to do, though he did admit accepting $400,000 from Western diplomats for passing on information.
Volodymyr Shilov, a prosecutor, said that General Pukach had testified that he was carrying out an order, but would not say what the order was or who issued it, according to the Interfax news agency. But just before guards took him away on Tuesday, General Pukach gave a revealing response to journalists who asked him to comment on the verdict, telling them to direct their questions to Mr. Kuchma and his chief of staff, Volodymyr Lytvyn.
“Ask Kuchma and Lytvyn, they’ll tell you everything,” he said, shaking his finger angrily, according to television coverage of the trial. “I told everything during the investigation and trial. So ask Lytvyn and Kuchma about their motives and intentions.”
The trial was mostly closed to journalists, who were allowed to be present only for the verdict and sentencing. But a lawyer representing Mr. Gongadze’s widow complained that the investigation and trial were flawed and inconsistent, overlooking evidence that General Pukach had intended to kill Mr. Gongadze.
“He spoke clearly about receiving an order to kill burn and bury him, and he was prepared for this,” said the lawyer, Valentyna Telychenko, in comments broadcast on television. “He brought a shovel and a canister of gasoline, meaning his actions were directed toward murder, and nothing else.”
General Pukach testified that he had been ordered to conduct surveillance by Ukraine’s interior minister — a man who was found dead in 2005, hours before he was to be questioned by prosecutors in the matter. Officials called it a suicide, though Ukrainian news agencies said he had suffered two gunshot wounds.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 29, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated, on first reference, the year of Georgy Gongadze’s death. It was in 2000, not 2002.
