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Asylum irks Ukraine
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A US decision to grant asylum to the widow of Georgy Gongadze, the murdered Ukrainian journalist at the centre of a scandal that has threatened to topple President Leonid Kuchma, was "not very agreeable", Kuchma said yesterday.
The foreign ministry said in Kiev earlier the United States had granted asylum rights to Miroslava Gongadze and the former Ukrainian security service officer Mikola Melnichenko, who first broke the long-running scandal by releasing tapes that purportedly revealed Kuchma ordering Gongadze's disappearance.
"I do not know yet who is behind this not very agreeable affair," Kuchma said of the American decision as he left an Easter service early yesterday at Kiev's Saint Vladimir cathedral.
The ministry's statement said: "The State Department in Washington informed Ukraine's ambassador to the United States on Friday that the American side had agreed to grant political asylum" to the controversial figures.
The State Department refused to confirm or deny the Ukrainian statement, saying that "as a matter of principle, we do not comment on questions of asylum rights".
However, Kiev rebuked Washington for "putting obstacles" in the way of its official investigation into the Gongadze case by providing Melnichenko with a means of escaping permanently from Ukrainian justice.
The United States knew that Ukraine's prosecutor general has launched a criminal case against Melnichenko "for having made the illegal recordings and revealed state secrets", the foreign ministry said in a later statement.
"The American decision to grant political asylum to Melnichenko, whose activities have jeopardized Ukraine's national security ... does not tally with the spirit of US-Ukrainian partnership and puts obstacles in the way of the investigation," the statement added.
The Melnichenko tapes implicated the president in 31-year-old Gongadze's disappearance last September.
Kuchma has denied any involvement in Gongadze's disappearance, which he has described as a "massive plot" orchestrated by his political opponents.(SD-Agencies)
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