The FBI will send investigators to Ukraine’s capital city after journalist Pavel Sheremet was killed Wednesday morning when a car bomb detonated in downtown Kiev.
President Petro Poroshenko met with Ukrainian law enforcement officials shortly after the blast ripped through the city center early Wednesday and ordered the creation of a task force to examine the explosion and “solve this crime as soon as possible,” his office said in a statement.
Mr. Poroshenko has appealed to the international community for assistance and has asked the FBI to deploy explosives experts in order to help with the investigation, the statement said.
Speaking to the slain journalist’s former outlet, Ukrainska Pravda, the president said he requested the FBI’s assistance to ensure the investigation is undertaken with utmost transparency.
The chief of Ukraine’s National Police, Khatiya Dekanoidze, has since confirmed that the FBI’s experts will participate in the probe, reported 112 Ukraine, a 24-hour news channel.
A FBI representative acknowledge its agents will assist in the investigation, reported Voice of America, a U.S. government-funded news service.
Sheremet, a Belarus-born Russian citizen, died Wednesday morning when a bomb placed beneath the car he was driving detonated on his way to work. He was 44.
Mr. Sheremet cut his teeth with Belarus state television in the 1990s, and, by the end of the decade was recognized by the New York Times with having penned “crusading reports about political abuses” in his home country. In 1998, he was awarded the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award.
“He upheld those standards through his years even as he mentored and inspired a generation of journalists in Ukraine,” CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said in a statement Wednesday. “His killers cannot be allowed to get away with this terrible crime.”
Most recently Sheremet wrote for Ukrainska Pravda, the online newspaper whose former editor, Georgy Gongadze, was abducted and beheaded in 2000.
Authorities say the automobile that exploded Wednesday morning belonged to Alena Pritula, a friend and former Ukrainska Pravda editor who has since been placed under government protection.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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