The Ukrainian government says Ms. Prytula will be placed under protection. Shkiryak said the device was either a delayed-action bomb or was remotely operated. The bomb, which reduced the auto to a burnt-out wreck, is believed to have contained about 600 grams of TNT. “I met with FBI representatives (US), and they, too, will be involved in the investigation”, Dekanoyidze said.
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“We are looking at all theories”, she said, according to the Associated Press.
Earlier in the day, Sheremet was killed when the vehicle he was traveling in blew up in the Ukrainian capital. Recalling the murder of another journalist Georgyi Gongadze, who was killed in 2001 in Ukraine, Mijatović demanded that Kiev does not allow the crime to go unpunished.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko immediately demanded that the perpetrators be brought to justice for this “terrible tragedy”.
Pavel Sheremet, 44, was a Belarusian journalist and TV host who has been exiled in Ukraine for many years due to media repression in Belarus.
Sheremet made a name for himself for his critical reporting about the authoritarian Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, he was released after three months amid pressure from Russian Federation.
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. Several years later he moved to Russian Federation to work in television. In 2010, his Belarusian citizenship was revoked. He founded the popular Belarussky Partizan opposition news website.
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In 2014, Sheremet resigned from Russia’s Channel One in protest over coverage of the conflict in Ukraine, saying that journalists who did not follow the “style of Kremlin propaganda” were “hounded” by Russia’s government. NPR’s Cory Flintoff reported in April that more than a million people had fled eastern Ukraine, where conflict between Russian-backed fighters and Ukrainian militias has killed thousands of people in the past two years.
