KYIV. Dec 13 (Interfax) - Police in Kyiv are continuing searches in the case dealing with the assassination of journalist Pavel Sheremet in 2016; in particular, they searched the apartment of volunteers Yevhen and Natalya Akastelov in the early hours of Friday.
Yevhen Akastelov said in a Facebook post on Friday morning that police officers had showed up at their home after midnight, and the search continued until about 5 a.m.
They seized several flash drives, hard disk drives, inoperable computers, and a duly registered hunting carbine, he said.
During the events on Kyiv's Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) five years ago, Akastelov acted as a deputy commander of a paramilitary volunteer unit known as The First Hundred. His wife Natalya is still providing help to injured military service members at hospitals.
A car belonging to the head of the online publication Ukrayinska Pravda, Olena Prytula, was blown up while Sheremet was driving it in central Kyiv early on July 20, 2016. The journalist died at the scene soon after the explosion.
On December 12, 2019, police conducted a number of searches and notified several people of their being treated as suspects in the Sheremet assassination case. Later in the day, the National Police and Interior Ministry held a news briefing, in which President Volodymyr Zelensky also spoke, to inform the public about a number of interim investigation findings and the suspects' names.
Military nurse Yana Duhar, volunteer and children's doctor Yulia Kuzmenko, and musician and veteran of the antiterrorist operation in Donbas Andriy Antonenko were officially notified of being suspected of killing Sheremet. The spouses Vladyslav and Inna Hryshchenko, also Donbas war veterans, were detained as suspects in a different case but were named as possibly having relation to the killing of Sheremet as well.
Ukrainian National Police deputy chief and criminal police chief Yevhen Koval said the investigation was inclined to assume that the primary motive of Sheremet's assassination was an attempt to destabilize the sociopolitical situation in the country.