Top independent reporter dies in Kiev car bomb
 

KIEV: A car bomb in Kiev on Wednesday killed a pro-Western reporter from a news site whose founder was beheaded 16 years ago after probing the alleged crimes of Ukrainian leaders.

The killing of 44-year-old Pavel Sheremet -- a Russian national born in Belarus -- added a new degree of uncertainty and fear to a country struggling with a pro-Moscow insurgency in the east and a prolonged stretch of eco**mic woes.

It also underscores the dangers Ukrainian reporters face despite Kiev’s alliance with the West and its historic break with Moscow in a 2014 pro-EU revolt.

Sheremet died when his bomb-rigged car exploded while he was driving to work along one of central Kiev’s cobble-stoned streets.

President Petro Poroshenko immediately demanded that the perpetrators be brought to justice for this "terrible tragedy".

"I am shocked -- there are ** other words for it," he wrote on Facebook.

The charred remains of Sheremet’s car -- its doors flung open and the windshield shattered -- stood behind a police cordon as investigators worked at the scene and sirens wailed.

A taxi driver who gave his name only as Petro told AFP that the blast was so fierce that "the flames from the windscreen went up to the second floor".

"He was in shock from pain and his legs seemed to be broken," the driver said.

He said witnesses called for an ambulance and started dragging Sheremet out of the burning wreck.

Sheremet was unable to speak but was moaning from pain. It remained unclear at which point he died.

The interior ministry called the killing a "brazen murder" aimed at destabilising the country.

Sheremet wrote opinion pieces and conducted interviews with top officials in which he demanded answers for the slow pace of Kiev’s efforts to stamp out embedded corruption and achieve sustainable growth.

He collaborated with Ukrainska Pravda for four years.

Its founder Georgiy Gongadze was murdered in 2000 after digging into the alleged financial and other crimes committed by then-president Leonid Kuchma -- a close ally of Russia at the time.

Gongadze’s killing was a national scandal that dragged on through the courts for years and at one point appeared to implicate Kuchma himself.

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