Chairman of Kherson Regional Council Vladyslav Manger, one of the key suspects in a fatal acid attack on Kherson activist Kateryna Handziuk, will be kept in a pretrial detention center until September 11.
Prosecutor Andriy Syniuk said Manger would be kept in a detention center subordinate to the SBU Security Service of Ukraine, according to the Hromadske media outlet.
On July 13, the Court of Appeals dismissed an appeal filed by Manger's lawyers, having upheld the previous ruling on remanding him in custody. They argued the suspicion against their client was unfounded, and the case was falsified.
In turn, the prosecution claims Manger threatened witnesses in the Handziuk case, which justifies the need to change the preventive measure to detention.
UNIAN memo. Kherson activist, advisor to the Mayor of Kherson and acting manager of affairs at Kherson City Council's executive committee Kateryna Handziuk, 33, on July 31, 2018, survived an acid attack. She suffered burns to more than 35% of her body and underwent 11 operations in Kyiv. Handziuk died on November 4, 2018.
Read alsoHandziuk case: Suspect Manger to be kept in pretrial detention center until July 28
The immediate cause of her death was a severed blood clot resulting from the acid attack. Police originally qualified the attack as an attempted murder committed with extreme cruelty, then its status was changed to completed murder. Six suspects were detained, one of whom, Mykola Novikov, was later released from custody as charges against him had been dropped.
On May 7, 2019, the Prosecutor General's Office sent an indictment against five defendants in the case of the murder: Mykyta Hrabchuk, Volodymyr Vasyanovych, Vyacheslav Vishnevsky, Serhiy Torbin, and Viktor Horbunov.
On June 6, 2019, the court announced their sentences. Torbin, the organizer of the murder, was sentenced to six years and six months in prison. Hrabchuk, the actual perpetrator of the crime, was sentenced to six years in prison. Accused of aiding, Vasyanovych and Horbunov were sentenced to four and three years in prison, respectively; accomplice Vishnevsky's sentence is four years' imprisonment.
Oleksiy Levin, who has a criminal record, as well as Chairman of Kherson Regional Council Vladyslav Manger and Ihor Pavlovsky, who was an assistant to MP Mykola Palamarchuk, are also suspects in the Handziuk murder case. Moreover, public activists believe that former Chairman of Kherson Regional State Administration Andriy Gordeev and former Deputy Chairman of Kherson Regional State Administration Yevhen Ryshchuk were involved in the crime. On January 27, Levin was put into custody in Bulgaria's Burgas for a 40-day term after detention on January 24. On February 22, the court of the city of Burgas (Bulgaria) ruled to extradite Levin to Ukraine. He was extradited on March 16 and Kyiv's Pechersky district court on March 17 ruled to remand him in custody until April 2. On March 25, Kyiv's Shevchenkivsky district court extended the pretrial probe into the Handziuk case until July 29.
Manger and Levin are suspected of committing crimes under Part 3 of Article 27, Part 2 of Article 28 and Part 2 of Article 121 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
