UKRAINE: A puzzle involving a headless body, secret tapes and a crusading journalist holds the key to the political deadlock now gripping Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Chris Stephen reports from Kiev
The story started in early 2000 when two journalists, Georgy Gongadze and Olena Pryktula, sick of the censorship gripping the country's press, launched their own Internet news site.
Calling the website Ukrainska Pravda, or Ukraine Truth, they built-up a readership rapidly, publishing uncensored stories, sometimes fed them by fellow journalists, about the goings-on in the corridors of power.
What infuriated the authorities most was the popularity of the site with the expatriate Ukrainians, who began agitating against President Leonid Kuchma, accusing him of tolerating corruption on a massive scale.
Gongadze ignored attempts to silence him, laughing off criticism. "He was a big guy, broad shoulders, full of life..., full of energy," Pryktula tells me, when we meet in the cramped city-centre apartment that is the office for Ukrainska Pravda.
On the night of September 16th, 2000, Gongadze (31), left Pryktula's apartment to go home to his wife and two young daughters, but he never arrived.
At first, friends were mystified by the disappearance, because there were several other journalists equally antagonistic to the authorities and they felt there was no particular reason to target him.
Two months later, a badly decomposed body was found hidden under some leaves in a wood near a village outside Kiev. With three friends she drove down to take a look.
"The morgue was very small," she says. "There was no fridge or anything like that, just a small room with a table in the middle and on that table was a body." Without a head, she could not recognise the body, but DNA tests identified it as almost certainly her colleague's. "That was the moment when I decided that nothing in this life could shock me more than this," she says.
Two weeks after the body was found came a bombshell: Leader of the opposition Social Democratic Party, Oleksandr Moroz, produced tapes in parliament that seemed to show President Kuchma ordering Mr Gongadze's murder.
Experts from the FBI later ruled that the voice was that of President Kuchma, but the latter claimed they were fakes made by the US to discredit his administration.
However, prosecutors investigating the disappearance turned up evidence that Gongadze has been under surveillance. Later, the investigation was mysteriously stopped.
By 2001, however, the case had become a cause célèbre for the opposition movement, a subject for street demonstrations and even for a special day, Gongadze Day, held on September 16th.
International journalist organisations rallied round and the United States gave asylum to the former body guard.
The tapes were made public in full, revealing what appears to be subversion, corruption and cronyism by the Kuchma regime on a vast scale. Last year Washington reacted with fury to parts of the tapes showing President Kuchma agreeing to sell radar equipment to Saddam Hussein.
This year, opposition presidential candidate Mr Victor Yushchenko promised a full investigation and criminal charges against the president.
And that is the problem. Mr Yushchenko is almost certain to be elected president in the re-run elections due on December 26th.
For President Kuchma, this could spell disaster, with investigations and possibly jail if found guilty of the murder or a string of other offences identified in the so-called Kuchma Tapes.
Reports say President Kuchma is refusing to sign bills needed to allow the December vote to go ahead without an immunity deal.
Yesterday he repeated his insistence that he will sign the paperwork necessary for elections only when the parliament controlled by opposition agrees to change the constitution to cut presidential powers, no doubt including the power to prosecute ex-presidents. Mr Yushchenko has so far refused to offer immunity, no doubt mindful of the effect such a deal would have on Kiev's protesters.
But without a deal, it is unclear what can force President Kuchma to agree to new elections, creating a constitutional logjam that has frustrated mediators and opposition leaders alike.
Should Mr Yushchenko consider offering immunity, others are ready to remind him of the importance of the Gongadze case.
The Orange Revolution has generated much traffic to Pryktula's web site which now has a million and a half hits a day and has become a force to be reckoned with.
"By our existence we remind people that the case of Georgy is not solved," she says. "An investigation will be the proof that Ukraine is becoming a democratic country."