KIEV, July 20. /TASS/. Kiev police has preliminarily classified the death of journalist Pavel Sheremet as premeditated murder.

"The information collected on this case was registered in Kiev’s Shevchenkovsky police department. Investigators preliminarily classify this as a premeditated murder. Prejudicial inquiry has been launched," the press service of Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s Kiev department said on Wednesday.

It was earlier reported that well-known journalist Pavel Sheremet has been killed in central Kiev. The car in which Sheremet was riding exploded at the corner of Bogdan Kmelnitsky and Ivan Franko streets. The car belonged to the head of the Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper Yelena Pritula, but she was not in the car.

"According to preliminary reports, it was an explosive device - home-made or not, we cannot say until experts determine this. It was placed very close to him," spokesman for Ukrainian Interior Ministry Artyom Shevchenko said.

Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has ordered law enforcement agencies to immediately investigate the case.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yury Lutsenko said that the crime will defeintely be solved. "I will do everything I can to solve the crime together with colleagues," he noted.

Pavel Sheremet was born in Minsk on November 28, 1971. In 1998, he took a job as a special correspondent of the Novosti program on Russia’s ORT TV channel and in January 1999 took the post of the managing editor of the Russian and foreign bureau of the TV channel’s information programs. He worked as a presenter in the weekly analytical program Vremya.

Since 2009 he worked as an editor for politics and society in the Ogonyok magazine.

For the past five years, Sheremet has lived in Kiev, working in the Ukrainskaya Pradva newspaper, as well as an anchorman on the Vesti radio.