Ukraine's SBU state security service on Wednesday detained an ex-presidential bodyguard famous for leaking wiretapped recordings that implicated former President Leonid Kuchma and other top officials in murder.
SBU operatives detained Mykola Melnychenko at an airport in Kiev, the service said in a statement, saying that the former bodyguard, who had been staying in the United States, was wanted for fraud, disclosure of state secrets and abuse of office.
It did not say what had brought him back to Ukraine days ahead of a parliamentary election on Sunday.
Melnychenko leaked what he said at the time were recordings made in Kuchma’s office which, if authentic, suggested that Kuchma and others had been involved in crimes such as the murder of investigative reporter Georgiy Gongadze in 2000.
Kuchma, 74, has strongly denied any role in the killing of the 31-year-old campaigning editor, whose headless body was found in a forest soon after his abduction. The case became post-Soviet Ukraine’s most notorious and was a turning point in Kuchma’s 10-year rule.
State prosecutors opened a criminal case against Kuchma – who was president from 1994 to 2005 – last March in connection with his alleged involvement in the killing of Gongadze, one of his sharpest public critics.
But in December, a local court threw out the charge, ruling that the secret recordings which appeared to incriminate him were inadmissible as evidence.
Another official implicated by Melnychenko’s tapes, former interior minister Yuri Kravchenko, was found dead in his country home in 2005. He had been shot in the head twice in what the authorities ruled was a suicide
