Ukraine's second President (1994-2005) Leonid Kuchma has said he had a face-to-face meeting with former Chief of the Interior Ministry's External Surveillance Department Oleksiy Pukach at the Prosecutor General's Office on Thursday.
"I can say that there was a face-to-face meeting with Pukach… I think they are guided by the principle of ‘no person – no problem: Kravchenko is dead’ so they can shift the blame onto him, because no one can confirm what actually happened," he told reporters in Kyiv in Thursday after his questioning at the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Kuchma quoted Pukach as saying at the face-to-face interrogation "that former Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko personally gave him [Pukach] an order with the assumption that the president [Kuchma] ordered him [Kravchenko] to kill journalist Georgy Gongadze and bury him so that no one could find him."
When asked why the interrogation lasted so long, Kuchma said that it was conducted in accordance with procedure.
"There were enough questions. Each of us read [the materials] from beginning to end, and signatures were given by the defendant and the witness, with Pukach as a witness and me as a defendant," – said Kuchma.
He said that his lawyer was present during the face-to-face interrogation.
When asked what Pukach said about the instigators of Gongadze’s murder, Kuchma said: "Nothing, apart from Kravchenko, Kravchenko, Kravchenko, Kravchenko."
The ex-president also declined to answer whether Pukach mentioned Volodymyr Lytvyn, a former chief of presidential administration and the current parliament.
The Prosecutor General’s Office scheduled another round of questioning for Kuchma for Monday, March 28.
