Kiev: The remains of a Ukrainian pro-opposition reporter who came to symbolise the fight for free speech were laid to rest Tuesday nearly 16 years after his mysterious kidnapping and beheading.
The grisly discovery of the body of Georgiy Gongadze, a former reporter for the Ukrainska Pravda news site, was made two months after his September 2000 kidnapping.
An audio recording subsequently emerged purportedly capturing then-president Leonid Kuchma demanding that the journalist be silenced.
A Ukrainian court dismissed all criminal charges against Kuchma in 2011 and the former president now represents Kiev at talks with Moscow on Ukraine's nearly two-year separatist conflict.
A former police general who confessed to personally strangling and beheading the reporter was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2013.
Three other officers who took part in the killing also received lengthy jail terms.
Gongadze's mother refused to accept that the remains discovered in a forest about 100 kilometres (60 miles) outside Kiev were really those of her 31-year-old son.
He was laid to rest at an Orthodox church in a historic district of Kiev but Ukrainian authorities did not explain why the Georgian-born reporter's body was buried on Tuesday.
Several reporters and politicians paid their last respects to Gogadze whose coffin was draped with the Ukrainian and Georgian flags.
"Georgiy Gongadze will forever remain in my memory as an honest and talented person, a real fighter for freedom and a better future for our country," President Petro Poroshenko wrote on Facebook.
Gogadze's relatives called on the authorities to punish those who ordered Gongadze's death, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.
AFP
