Ukraine's Yushchenko 'Poisoned With Dioxin'

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko was the victim of a deliberate poisoning with the toxic chemical dioxin, the country's state prosecutor said on Thursday, citing official test results more than a year after the politician was disfigured by a mystery illness.


Tests carried out by Ukrainian, American, German and Japanese experts "allow us to think that Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned in a premeditated fashion", the prosecutor said in a statement.

It did not give details of the likely timing or circumstances of the poisoning.

Yushchenko still bears facial disfigurement after falling ill during his presidential election campaign in September 2004, the day after he had dined with officials from the Ukrainian security services.

Authorities rejected allegations that Yushchenko had been poisoned but later tests by Austrian doctors who treated him revealed the presence of dioxin.

The illness came during a bitter presidential election campaign in which he was the main opposition candidate. He was later elected president in the so-called "Orange Revolution", when he led protests against rigged second-round voting.

The poisoning severely disfigured his once-handsome features and stopped him from campaigning for several crucial weeks before the first round of voting.

In the months after Yushchenko came to power in 2005, the investigation into who poisoned him did not advance. The Ukrainian leader blamed the lack of progress on the former prosecutor general, Svyatoslav Piskun.

Under the new prosecutor general, Ukrainian investigators for the first time took samples of Yushchenko's blood as part of the official investigation and forwarded them for analysis to laboratories abroad.

Results announced last year from laboratories in several countries confirmed a massive presence of dioxin in Yushchenko's blood, but did not indicate whether the poisoning was deliberate.

Source: AFP