Kidnapped Ukrainian journalist's body found near Kiev

Friends of Vasily Sergiyenko, who was also a member of the right-wing Svoboda party, say he was tortured before being killed

Vasily Sergiyenko took part in protests against Ukraine's ousted president Viktor Yanukovych. Photograph: Viktor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images

Oksana Grytsenko in Kiev and Luke Harding

 Sunday 6 April 2014 

The body of a kidnapped journalist who took part in protests againstUkraine's president Viktor Yanukovych has been found dumped in a forest 60 miles outside the capital Kiev.

Vasily Sergiyenko – a local journalist and the member of the right-wing Svoboda party – was abducted from his home in the city of Korsun-Shevchenkivskyi on Friday evening Three men reportedly grabbed him and bundled him into a white Lada car, which neighbours had spotted previously. A trail of bloodstains were found outside his house.

Police said on Sunday his body had been discovered in a shallow grave in a wood, 15km from the city. According to friends from his self-defence unit, one of dozens of local organisations that sprung up in the wake of Ukraine's anti-Yanukovych protests, Segiyenko had been brutally tortured then killed.

"We found a place that looked like a freshly dug pit. We waited for prosecutors to arrive then begin digging. The spot was covered with rubbish. Under it was a body. The man had been handcuffed. The guys recognised this was the missing Vasily Sergiyenko," Oleg Sobchenko told Ukrainian media.

Sobchenko said the were wounds to the journalist's knees, as well as stab marks to his kidney, heart and back. His killers had severed his head, he said, adding that there were indications the murder had been planned in advance. "Fresh earth was mixed in with dry. The grave had been dug earlier," he said.

Svoboda said that Sergiyenko's killing had all the hallmarks of a politically motivated hit. The journalist worked for the local Nadrossia newspaper and was an active member of Automaidan – a movement of car drivers who opposed Yanukovych. One of its leaders, Dmytro Bulatov, was kidnapped in late January by unknown assailants. They eventually released him, but only after cutting off part of his ear.

Svoboda's leader Oleh Tyahnybok said that Sergiyenko and other Svoboda representatives had received menacing threats over the past week. Tyahnybok's party is nationalist in orientation and took an active role in the street protests in February that saw Yanukovych flee to Russia. The pro-Ukrainian party, which was previously in opposition, has four ministerial posts in the new government.

Russia has seized on Svoboda's official political role as evidence that "fascists" supported by the EU and US have grabbed power in Ukraine. Western officials and analysts say that Svoboda has disavowed its earlier radicalism, and note the party's electoral success reflects a reaction to Yanukovych's Russification policies. Tyahnybok is running for president in the May 25 election but is unlikely to win.

Speaking on Sunday, Svoboda's spokesman Yury Syrotiuk said he believed the journalist's death was linked to a feud with a local businessman, Hennady Bobov – a prominent deputy in Yanukovych's Party of Regions. The party has dissociated itself from Yanukovych and gone into opposition in the Rada, Ukraine's parliament.

"Sergiyenko was a very calm man, who was looking after his elderly mother. He wasn't interested in confrontation," Syrotiuk said. "The only thing he was doing that might have provoked an angry response was a series of investigations into corruption allegations involving Bobov. This was a very savage killing."

Syrotiuk added that Svoboda also had a longstanding dispute with representatives of Party of Regions in the Cherkasy region where in the last week alone there were three attacks on Svoboda's activists.

Bobov has denied any involvement in the murder. The businessman offered a reward for information after the journalist vanished and urged the authorities to take the matter under their personal control, local media reported.