Antonenko remains in prison / Photo from UNIAN

Kyiv's Shevchenkivsky district court has ruled that former Donbas war volunteer and musician Andrii Antonenko, a suspect in the murder case of journalist Pavel Sheremet, should remain in custody.

The jury did not satisfy a motion filed by Antonenko's lawyers for a change in his measure of restraint from arrest to release on personal recognizance, an UNIAN correspondent reported on September 28.

Read alsoSheremet case: Ankle monitor removed from suspect Kuzmenko

Видео дня

"The motion should be dismissed. The ruling may be appealed in Kyiv's Court of Appeals," the presiding judge, Oksana Holub, said.

She also announced that the next hearings on the case would begin at 13:30 Kyiv time on October 8. The court is to determine the procedure for examining evidence and hear the parties' motions.

Sheremet murder case: Details

  • The journalist was assassinated in a car blast in the center of Kyiv on the morning of July 20, 2016.
  • On December 12, 2019, police said they suspected five persons of complicity in the crime: former Donbas war volunteer and musician Andrii Antonenko, army volunteer and pediatric surgeon Yulia Kuzmenko (nom de guerre "Lysa," or "Fox"), nurse with a paratrooper unit Yana Duhar, and a family couple of army volunteers Inna Hryshchenko ("Puma"), and Vladyslav Hryshchenko ("Bucha"). Law enforcers claim that the goal of the Sheremet assassination was to destabilize the social and political situation in Ukraine. Antonenko, Kuzmenko and Duhar were notified of suspicion on December 12, 2019.
  • Ukrainian investigative journalists with the Slidstvo.info project said they had found the forensic analysis report used in the probe into the murder of Sheremet far from being unambiguous, while evidence presented by the police was not convincing. What is more, many Ukrainian activists consider the proof collected by the investigators to be insufficient.
  • On August 25, all three defendants demanded in court that their case be heard by the jury. Holub, the chair of the panel of judges, said that since they all were facing life imprisonment, the Criminal Code allows such cases to be heard by a jury, which consists of two professional judges and three members of the jury.
  • On September 28, the prosecutor in the Sheremet case read out the indictment to Antonenko, Kuzmenko and Duhar in Kyiv's Shevchenkivsky district court.