KIEV, Sept. 15 – A lawyer representing Myroslava Gongadze, the widow of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze, will ask the court to authorize additional investigation against officials that had been “incorrectly” and “groundlessly” omitted from being properly investigated.

Valentyna Telychko did not name any particular officials and broadly described them as “various officials, senior, and less senior, former and those who currently hold and don’t hold posts.”

The comment, made in an interview with Channel 5 on Wednesday, comes after prosecutors have completed investigation into the murder of Gongadze in September 2000 and prepare to submit the case to court.

The investigation focused on alleged role of Oleksiy Pukach, a former top police officer who had admitted to murdering Gongadze after receiving direct order from his boss, then Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko.

Kravchenko, dead since March 2005, was named by the prosecutors as the only person who had ordered the murder of Gongadze, contrary to speculations that more senior officials could have been involved.

The murder, in September 2000, had shocked Ukraine’s political landscape triggering massive demonstrations with protesters alleging that President Leonid Kuchma was involved.

Kuchma, Kravchenko and Volodymyr Lytvyn, Kuchma’s former chief of staff and currently the speaker of Parliament, were alleged by Mykola Melnychenko, Kuchma’s former bodyguard, of conspiring against Gongadze.

Both, Kuchma and Lytvyn denied the charges.

Lytvyn is now a key ally of President Viktor Yanukovych and is a member of the governing coalition.

Pukach allegedly told the investigators that Lytvyn had learned about the murder of Heorhiy Gongadze the next day, on Sept. 17, 2000, after visiting the office of Kravchenko.

Mykola Dzhyha, then the first deputy interior minister, and Eduard Fere, the head of staff at the interior ministry, were also present the meeting with Lytvyn.

Dzhyha is currently the governor of the Vinnytsia region and is an ally of Yanukovych. Fere is dead.

“Volodymyr Mykhaylovych [Lytvyn], this is our colleague that has personally settled accounts with Gongadze,” Kravchenko told Lytvyn introducing Pukach, Ukrayinska Pravda reported citing Pukach’s statement to the prosecutors.

After that, Kravchenko tapped Pukach on his shoulder and told Lytvyn: “Tell the president that we will execute any of his orders.”

Shortly afterwards, Kravchenko and Lytvyn held a one-on-one meeting, and Pukach had been later ordered to decapitate and to re-bury Gongadze’s body in a different place.

Lytvyn told the investigators that he had never met Pukach.

“I don’t know you,” Lytvyn told Pukach when the two had a meeting during the investigation.

Dzhyha also denied having the meeting with Pukach on Sept. 17.

“The ideologist of this operation [the murder of Gongadze] – and I state this officially - was Lytvyn,” Melnychenko said on Wednesday cited by LigaBiznesInform.

“Kuchma did not have a personal motive” to order the murder, Melnychenko said. “But Lytvyn did have personal motives. I think he could tell about his personal motives.”

Meanwhile, Kuchma on Wednesday again denied any wrongdoing, and said that the Gongadze’s murder was organized by “foreign intelligence services.”

“This is an international provocation to compromise Ukraine,” Kuchma said in Chernihiv. He did not specify what country was behind it, but alleged that the U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency spies had been participating in massive demonstrations against him after the murder.

“This was paid for, and anything is possible for money,” Kuchma said.

Kuchma also praised Barack Obama, the U.S. president, for changing the U.S. foreign policy by refusing to promote democracy throughout the world.

The promotion was democracy in the world was the key foreign policy feature of Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush. (tl/ez)