Member of commission 'on pedophilia' planning to submit collected documents to prosecutors
Kyiv, January 14 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Regions Party MP Viktor Korzh, who is a member of the Ukrainian parliament's commission investigating the circumstances of a child molestation case, has said he will submit the documents on the case to the Prosecutor General's Office.
"I'm trying to establish the truth on my own… I'll soon submit to the Prosecutor General's Office the documents I've collected as an MP, as well as the evidence provided by police officers and the Prosecutor General's Office," he said at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine on Thursday.
Korzh said that abused children had pointed to the address of an apartment in Kyiv in which they were raped. He noted that they also said that other "badly dressed" children had been exposed to violence in another apartment at the same address.
"We found that Kyiv's fund of humanitarian programs had been registered at one of these apartments in this house… According to the children, this is the apartment from which children, always new ones, were led to another apartment where they were raped. This has been confirmed on the basis of our data and according to the children," he said.
He also said that a man, born in 1977, who was registered at the apartment where children were abused, is a co-founder of two media television companies "that closely cooperated with [the children's stepfather, Dmytro] Poliukhovych, who currently remains in a pretrial detention center," Korzh said.
"So there's a direct link between the apartment in which children were raped and the charity fund that was located at the same address … and between the mentioned television and radio companies and Poliukhovych, who is the pretrial detention center. All of these people are familiar with each other and have mutual interests. According to our information, these interests are not in line with the laws of our state," he said.
Korzh also accused the Prosecutor General's Office of dragging its feet over the case.
"As far as we know, the Prosecutor General's Office ignored this information and checked nothing… It hasn't questioned the neighbors and residents of the house," he said.
As reported, Regions Party MP Vadym Kolesnichenko said on October 13 that children had been raped at the Artek international children's center and asked law enforcement agencies to prevent the closure of this criminal case.
The criminal case on child sex abuses at Artek is being investigated by the main investigative department of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry.
Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko said on October 14 that police had accused the stepfather of two raped children of child sex abuse, while a further three leaders of the Artek center are witnesses in the case, and they would most likely also be accused of committing this crime. He also said that reports are available to the ministry that a number of Ukrainian MPs are involved in this case.
On October 15-16, a number of Ukrainian newspapers (Ukraina Moloda, Segodnia, etc) published reports pointing to the surnames of BYT MPs allegedly involved in child sex abuse – Serhiy Teriokhin, Viktor Ukolov and Ruslan Bohdan. All of them denied their involvement in the case. The management of Artek also rebuffed allegations of the sexual molestation of children at the children's center. Police are conducting a number of searches as part of investigating the case, particularly at the apartment of the center's director general, Borys Novozhylov.
Moreover, the media reported that a priest of the Uman Eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) is also involved in the child sex abuse scandal.