Prominent Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet killed in car blast in Kiev

Pavel Sheremet, who had worked in Ukraine for the past five years, was killed in a car explosion in the central part of Kiev early in the morning of July 20, his colleagues from Ukrayinska Pravda reported.

Picture: tkb.lv

The explosion occurred at about 7:45 local time, while Sheremet was driving to work. He was in a car that belonged to editor-in-chief of Ukrayinska Pravda Alyona Pritula. Police arrived at the scene.

According to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko, the explosion was the result of a bomb.

“It was reported from the scene that the death of Pavel Sheremet is a result of an explosive device. It’s a murder. I express my condolences to Alyona and friends of the deceased. Me and my colleagues wi ll do everything we can to solve this crime”, Lutsenko wrote in Facebook.

For the past five years Pavel Sheremet lived in Kiev where he worked as a journalist for Ukrayinska Pravda and a presenter at Radio Vesti.

Pavel Sheremet, 44, was born in Minsk. He studied at BSU and BSEU, and became a journalist in 1992 after some years of work in the financial sphere. Sheremet used to work as a financial consultant for the Belarusian TV, then the anchor and producer of Prospekt, a weekly news and analysis program on Belarus state television.

In 1996 Sheremet became editor-in-chief of the Belarusian newspaper Belarusskaya Delovaya Gazeta. The same year, he began working for the Russian public television company ORT, and was named its Minsk bureau chief in 1996.

Picture: www.pravda.com.ua

In July 1997, Sheremet, along with an ORT cameraman and their drivers, filmed himself crossing illegally from Belarus to Lithuania and back again to show the ease with which smugglers could cross the border. Sheremet and his companions were detained by a border patrol after jumping a fence to film unguarded areas. The journalist was later charged with illegal border crossing, “exceeding their professional rights as journalists”, and participating in a conspiracy.

In 2010 the journalist was deprived of Belarusian citizenship.

Pavel Sheremet worked for Russian channels ORT and REN-TV, in magazine “Ogonyok”, in Ukrayinska Pravda and Vesti.

Acrid smell of burnt rubber, plastic in air here. Journalists sad, angry at having to report on death of their own. pic.twitter.com/zTB0D3fYTq
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) July 20, 2016

He was among the founders of a popular science history online edition Istoricheskaya pravda (Truth about history) and the author and creator of news website Belaruspartisan.

Source: TUT.BY