Melnychenko confirms he has testified before U.S. grand jury in California (05/26/02)

Melnychenko confirms he has testified before U.S. grand jury in California

by Yaro Bihun
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

WASHINGTON - The former bodyguard of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, Mykola Melnychenko, confirmed that he has testified before a U.S. grand jury in California but declined to say in which case.

"I have been called to help in an investigation," he said during a press briefing here May 21, "but I would like to say that this is not an investigation of [Pavlo] Lazarenko" - the former prime minister of Ukraine awaiting trial in San Francisco for money laundering and other crimes.

Mr. Melnychenko said that he could not say anything more about the grand jury investigation, but added that he was convinced "that this investigation will help in the fight against organized crime."

Mr. Melnychenko also repeated his claim that one of his recordings show that President Kuchma actually gave his consent to the sale of the Ukrainian-built Kolchuha air defense system to Iraq in July of 2000 after Valerii Malev, who headed Ukraine's arms export agency, informed him that Iraq had expressed an interest in buying the system.

The government of Ukraine has denied this claim, and on April 29 the U.S. State Department said that the United States had seen "no credible evidence" that the air defense system was transferred to Iraq and that Ukraine had assured Washington that such a transfer had not and would not take place.

Mr. Melnychenko stressed that it was not Ukraine that agreed to sell illegal arms. "The illegal sale of arms was the work of senior Ukrainian government officials," he said.

The press briefing was held in the Washington offices of Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe on the very day Ukrainian Internet journalist Heorhii Gongadze would have celebrated his 33rd birthday had he not been killed under circumstances that, again, according to allegations based on Mr. Melnychenko's secret recordings, involve President Kuchma in his disappearance.

Mr. Melnychenko has received political asylum in the United States.

Appearing with Mr. Melnychenko at the briefing was Bruce Koenig, a former FBI audio expert who earlier had analyzed segments of the secret recordings and pronounced that they were neither compiled or edited. He reiterated his conclusion that he "found nothing wrong" with them.

As for the whereabouts of the estimated 1,000 hours of secretly recorded presidential conversations, Mr. Melnychenko said these recordings are not on U.S. territory.

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