Screening of the documentary by Anna Babinets, Elena Loginova, Vlad Lavrov, Dmytro Gnap, Matt Sarnecki; Q&A with the authors. Finalist Investigative Long
“Killing Pavel” by Anna Babinets, Elena Loginova, Vlad Lavrov, Dmytro Gnap, Matt Sarnecki | Production: Slidstvo.info, OCCRP (Ukraine 2017), 49'
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.info 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.
Anna Babinets is a co-founder and reporter for the investigative agency Slidstvo.info. She has worked as a regional editor for OCCRP since 2015, and specializes in corruption in the Ukrainian Army, the security sector and the oil and gas markets. She was also a member of the YanukovychLeaks team. Elena Loginova is a reporter for OCCRP. She was part of the cross border investigative teams for the Russian and Azerbaijani Laundromats and the Panama and Paradise Papers. Vlad Lavrov is a staff reporter for the Kyiv Post and a regional editor for OCCRP. He reported from the frontline of the Kyiv barricades and was a leader in the YanukovychLeaks campaign. With OCCRP he investigated cigarette smuggling along the Ukraine-EU border area. Dmytro Gnap is a co-founder both of Slidstvo.info and Hromadske TV, and an investigative reporter for OCCRP. His work focuses on large scale corruption and crime. Matt Sarnecki is the multimedia editor and a producer at OCCRP. He has produced multiple documentaries for OCCRP and documentary series featured in Powder Magazine and Vice.