Georgiy Gongadze

In 1967, the Gongadze family moved to Tbilisi.

Georgiy was born as a twin, but his brother was kidnapped from the hospital soon after their birth.

When Gongadze was six years old, his parents divorced.

His father later remarried and had another son with his second wife.

Georgiy Ruslanovych Gongadze (21 May 1969 – 17 September 2000) was a Georgian-Ukrainian journalist and film director who was kidnapped and murdered in 2000 near Kyiv.

In 1986 he enrolled in the Foreign Languages Institute in Tbilisi with a specialisation in English, but in 1987 he was drafted into the Soviet Border Troops, serving in Turkmenistan on the border with Iran.

His mother said that she had to pay to avoid him being sent to Afghanistan to fight in the Soviet–Afghan War.

Around that time, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev started his reforms of perestroika and glasnost.

The reforms sped up the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Trying to preserve the Soviet state, several armed and civil conflicts arose in the Soviet Union, among them the [Soviet troops killed 21 unarmed civilians.

This radicalised many Georgians, including Gongadze.

In May 1989, Gongadze was discharged from the Border Troops.

He and his father both joined the national movement "For Free Georgia"; Georgiy became its spokesperson, while Ruslan became the leader.

In 1989 and 1990, Georgiy travelled to the Baltic states and Ukraine in an attempt to drum up foreign support for Georgia's independence from the Soviet Union.

As part of his tour, in September 1989 he attended the first congress of the People's Movement of Ukraine in Kyiv, where he represented For Free Georgia.

Gongadze also attended Chervona Ruta, the first non-communist music and youth festival, held in September 1989 in Chernivtsi.

At the festival, he met Mariana Stetsko, whom he married in 1990, and settled in Lviv, where he found a job as a teacher of English and physical education.

While working, Gongadze also studied at the Romano-Germanic Languages Faculty of the University of Lviv.

On 24 August 1991, following the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, the Verkhovna Rada announced that all residents of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic were considered to be citizens of Ukraine.

In 1991, the first president of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, declared several of his former allies as "enemies of the people", among them Ruslan Gongadze.

Ruslan was forced to hide in the basement of a building next to the parliament in Tbilisi.

In December 1991, a civil war ensued when government forces opened fire upon anti-Gamsakhurdia protestors in Tbilisi, while a militia armed by the oppositional parties counter-attacked.

At the end of 1991 during the ongoing war, Georgiy Gongadze returned to his mother in Tbilisi.

He led a team of medical emergency services transferring wounded to a hospital until snipers opened fire on them.

On 14 January 1992, Gamsakhurdia fled Tbilisi and the conflict ended.

His mother did not remarry, and continued to live and work in Tbilisi until 1994.

During his school years, Gongadze was an outstanding athlete, and was part of the Soviet reserve Olympic team for the 100 and 200 metres.

In addition to his native Ukrainian, he learned to speak Russian, Georgian, and English.

He founded the online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda along with Olena Prytula in 2000.

The circumstances of his death became a national scandal and a focus for protests against then-President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma.

During the Cassette Scandal, audiotapes were released on which Kuchma, Volodymyr Lytvyn and other top-level administration officials are heard discussing the need to silence Gongadze for his online news reports about high-level corruption.

Former Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko died of two gunshot wounds to the head on 4 March 2005, just hours before he was to begin providing testimony as a witness in the case.

Kravchenko was the superior of the four policemen who were charged with Gongadze's murder soon after Kravchenko's death.

The official ruling of suicide was doubted by media reports.

Three former officials of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry's foreign surveillance department and criminal intelligence unit (Valeriy Kostenko, Mykola Protasov and Oleksandr Popovych) accused of his murder were arrested in March 2005 and a fourth one (Oleksiy Pukach, the former chief of the unit ) in July 2009.

A court in Ukraine sentenced Protasov to a sentence of 13 years and Kostenko and Popovych to 12-year terms March 2008 (the trial had begun January 2006 ) for the murder.

Gongadze's family believe the trial had failed to bring the masterminds behind the killing to justice.

No one has yet been charged with giving the order for Gongadze's murder.

Born in Tbilisi, at the time the capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union, Gongadze was the son of Ruslan Gongadze, a Georgian architect, and Olesya Korchak, a Ukrainian dentist and a native of Lviv.

His parents met in Lviv, where they studied in university and eventually married.