Government prosecutors on Wednesday began questioning Ukraine's former president Leonid Kuchma about his possible involvement in the killing of opposition journalist Georgy Gongadze more than a decade ago.
Kuchma, who was Ukraine's second president from 1994 to 2005, told reporters at the entrance of the general prosecutor's office in Kiev that he was innocent and that he was confident the investigation would prove his innocence.
"I am ready to go through all the tortures of hell to do this," Kuchma said. "I want to see only the truth about what I did and did not do written in Ukraine's history."
Prosecutors on Tuesday identified Kuchma as a suspect in the September 2000 murder of Gongadze, who was the managing editor of the Ukrainska Pravda independent news website. The website, which still exists, had been critical of Kuchma, dpa reported.
Audio tapes allegedly recorded by a former Kuchma bodyguard, released soon after Gongadze's death, seemed to capture Kuchma ordering his interior minister to eliminate Gongadze in a contract killing.
Kuchma has repeatedly called the tapes fraudulent and described the bodyguard, Mykola Melnychenko, as a traitor. But prosecutors on Monday evening said the recordings might be admissible as evidence.
Melnychenko, a former secret police major, arrived at the prosecutor general's office about an hour after Kuchma entered the building.
He told reporters prosecutors had summoned him to give evidence, and that he hoped to confront his former boss face-to-face.
Kuchma said that he was "calm" about facing prosecutors but that he preferred not to meet Melnychenko "for obvious reasons."
The identification of Kuchma as the possible mastermind of Gongadze's murder comes two months after a Kiev court seemed to halt any further investigation into the case, concluding that there were insufficient grounds to pursue alleged links to Kuchma and former interior mininster Yury Kravchenko.
Three members of a police hit squad were sentenced in 2008 for participating in Gongadze's murder. The squad's leader is awaiting trial.
A previous investigation had looked into allegations that Kravchenko directed the hit squad under orders from Kuchma. Kravchenko committed suicide in 2008 on the day he was scheduled to be questioned by prosecutors about his role in Gongadze's death.
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