Kuchma outraged by reports alleging his arrest

Talking to journalists in Kharkiv upon arrival from Kyiv on Thursday, Kuchma said he, in fact, boarded the plane at the Boryspil Airport and that his flight was delayed because of heavy snowfall in the Kyiv area.

“But why should I have been detained? The one who invented this has something wrong with their head,” he said.

Some Russian and Ukrainian media outlets reported earlier on Thursday that Kuchma had been detained at the Zhuliany Airport. Kuchma’s lawyer Viktor Petrunenko denied these reports.

Kuchma also described as a provocation First Deputy Prosecutor General Renat Kuzmin’s recent statement that the office has enough proof of the ex-president’s role in the killing of journalist Georgy Gongadze.

“This is another banal example of a provocation, which I’ve heard more than enough in the past 12 years,” Kuchma said in reply to a question from Interfax in Kharkiv on Thursday.

Kuzmin said on Echo Moskvy radio on Wednesday that the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office had enough evidence confirming Kuchma’s responsibility for ordering Gongadze’s assassination.

Journalist Gongadze disappeared on September 16, 2000. Forensic experts said a headless corpse found in a forest near Kyiv in November that year might be Gongadze’s body and that cranium fragments found in the Kyiv region in 2009 were definitely parts of his skull.

However, the body remains unburied as Gongadze’s mother refuses to recognize it as her son’s remains.

Kuchma was charged by the Prosecutor General’s Office on March 21, 2011, of abusing power that led to Gongadze’s murder, but the Pechersky Court dropped the charges on December 13, 2011, refusing to accept former presidential bodyguard Mykola Melnychenko’s audiotapes as evidence.

Kuchma denies his complicity in Gongadze’s murder.

On January 29, 2013, the Pechersky Court found Oleksiy Pukach, former head of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s outdoor surveillance department, guilty of killing Gongadze and sentenced him to life in prison. Pukach was stripped of his rank as lieutenant-general.

Asked by the judge whether he understands the sentence, Pukach replied, “I will understand the sentence when Kuchma and Lytvyn [a former member of the presidential secretariat and later Verkhovna Rada Chairman Volodymyr Lytvyn] are jailed along with me.”