Killing Pavel

On July 20, 2016, Pavel Sheremet, an award-winning Belarusian-born journalist living in Ukraine, was killed by a car bomb in Kyiv. The shocking murder of a sharp critic of Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian officials was the most high-profile assassination in Ukraine’s recent history.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko vowed to solve the crime, and personally appointed a special task force led by the chief of the national police. Within hours of the murder, a team of journalists from the Organized Crime and
Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Slidstvo went to work, soliciting closed-circuit camera footage from residents and businesses near the scene. They collected hundreds of hours of exclusive CCTV footage, which formed the basis of a documentary investigation that led to remarkable revelations.

Among the journalists’ key findings were that the police never found or overlooked key CCTV footage, failed to locate and interview key witnesses, and failed to discover or reveal that a former member of Ukraine’s Security Service was mysteriously present at the scene of the crime.