KIEV, Jan. 29 – A former top police officer on Tuesday was sentenced to life in prison for murdering an investigative journalist 12.5 years ago, but the court failed to determine who had ordered the killing.

Heorhiy Gongadze, a founder of Ukrainskaya Pravda, a website which exposed high-level corruption, was kidnapped in September, 2000 and his decapitated body was found in a forest outside Kiev several months later.

The Pechersk district court in Kiev on Tuesday convicted Oleksiy Pukach, the former chief of the surveillance department at the Internal Affairs Ministry, of the murder. Three lower ranking police officers had been earlier convicted in the case.

Pukach testified that he had not intended to kill Gongadze, but that he strangled him with a belt accidentally in the course of an interrogation. He is the highest-ranking official to be convicted in Gongadze’s death.

Suspicions of official involvement grew with the release of covert recordings made by one of bodyguards of then President Leonid Kuchma in which a man who sounded like the president spoke of Gongadze with his former chief of staff Volodymyr Lytvyn and former Internal Affairs Minister Yuriy Kravchenko. “Take him and throw him away without pants” and “give him to the Chechens,” the man said.

Gongadze’s murder set off months of protests in 2000 and 2001 aimed against Kuchma.

Kuchma, as well as Lytvyn, who later became the speaker of Parliament in 2007-2012, have denied the accusations.

Kravchenko was found dead in his garage in March 2005 hours before he was supposed to be questioned by prosecutors in connection with the murder.

Prosecutors opened an investigation of Kuchma in 2011, but a court dropped the charges against him later that year.

Following the sentence, Pukach, asked by reporters, said he would agree with the sentence only “if Kuchma and Lytvyn sit next to me in this cage.”

“I told everything to investigators and to the court,” Pukach said.

Valentyna Telychenko, a lawyer for Myroslava Gongadze, the wife of Heorhiy Gongadze, said the prosecutors have failed to properly investigate who had ordered the murder.

“Pukach has repeatedly spoken in his testimonies about Kuchma and Lytvyn, about where and when he has met Lytvyn, but this hasn’t been used in the investigation of the murder,” Telychenko said.

In March 2008 a court convicted three former police officers, Mykola Protasov, Valeriy Kostenko and Oleksandr Popovych, for their involvement in the Gongadze murder. All three named Pukach as the killer.

Protasov was sentenced to 13 years in jail. Kostenko and Popovych each received 12-year sentences.

In September, 2000, Gongadze got into what he thought was a taxi and was joined by three other men. He was driven outside Kiev where Pukach and his accomplices took off the journalist's shoes and jacket, bound his hands and feet and put him on the side of a pit they dug.

The court said Gongadze pleaded for his life, but Pukach strangled him, first with his hands and then with a belt. Gongadze's body was then doused with gasoline and burned.

Pukach later returned to the scene to decapitate the corpse. (tl/ez)