Five people are suspected of involvement in the murder of journalist Pavel Sheremet in the summer of 2016.
First Deputy Chief of the National Police of Ukraine Yevhen Koval said at a briefing on Thursday, December 12, that National Police investigators had conducted over 800 operations to seize documents and collect information, interrogated more than 3,700 people, had 47 different examinations, visited 577 houses and 4,300 apartments, analyzed recordings from 221 video surveillance cameras, according to an UNIAN correspondent.
Read alsoPolice detain suspects in Sheremet murder case – interior minister
Examinations and other data collected give reason to objectively suspect that the following individuals had committed the assassination: former Donbas war volunteer and member of the Riffmaster band Andrii Antonenko, civil volunteer and doctor Yulia Kuzmenko (nom de guerre "Lysa," or "Fox"), Yana Duhar, Inna Hryshchenko ("Puma") and her husband Vladyslav Hryshchenko ("Bucha").
According to the investigation, Duhar reportedly carried out reconnaissance near the scene of the crime. Kuzmenko and Antonenko had their phones turned off the night before Sheremet's murder, the investigators said.
Vladyslav Hryshchenko is a specialist in explosives and appears in a case of an attempted murder of another person with the use of an explosive device.
According to the conclusions of the examinations based on psychological and appearance profiling and comparison with the examined CCTV footage, the male person who participated in planting an explosive device under Sheremet's car was Antonenko, the female person who planted the explosives was Kuzmenko, which is also confirmed by their mobile phone data records. Their phones were turned off on the night of the crime, which is not typical of them.
Important to the investigation was the fact that Antonenko often wears clothes with specific prints – the same as the man who planted the explosives. In addition, Antonenko lives near the crime scene. The Hryshchenkos' phones during the crime and the day before were traced in Dnipro, however, on that very day the phones were inactive, and some time after the assassination, they became active again.
It was reported that the suspects in the murder of Pavel Sheremet were identified during a probe into other seemingly unrelated crimes.
UNIAN memo.Pavel Sheremet, a journalist from Belarus who was residing in Kyiv, was blown up in a car on the morning of July 20, 2016. Police opened a criminal case under Clause 5 of Part 2 of Article 115 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (felonious homicide committed in a way dangerous for many people's life).
