It’s official! Ukrainian officials have announced that now-Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned during the 2004 elections there:
Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko was the victim of a deliberate poisoning with the toxic chemical dioxin, the country’s state prosecutor said Thursday, citing official test results more than a year after the politician was disfigured by a mystery illness.
The AFX news agency quoted the official as saying that the tests carried out by Ukrainian, U.S., German and Japanese experts “allow us to think that Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned in a premeditated fashion.â€
It did not give details of the likely timing or circumstances of the poisoning.
Yushchenko still bears signs of facial disfigurement after falling ill during his presidential election campaign in September 2004, the day after he had dined with officials from the Ukrainian security services.
Authorities had rejected allegations that Yushchenko had been poisoned, but later tests by Austrian doctors who treated him revealed the presence of dioxin.
The illness came during a bitter presidential election campaign in which he was the main opposition candidate. He was later elected president in the so-called “Orange revolutionâ€, when he led protests against rigged second-round voting.
The poisoning severely disfigured his once handsome features and stopped him from campaigning for several crucial weeks before the first round of voting.
In the months after Yushchenko came to power in 2005, the investigation into who poisoned him did not advance. The Ukrainian leader blamed the lack of progress on the former prosecutor general, Svyatoslav Piskun.
Under the new prosecutor general, Ukrainian investigators for the first time took samples of Yushchenko’s blood as part of the official investigation and forwarded them for analysis to laboratories abroad.
Hat tip:Â Step At A Time
If president is not safe in his own country what will be about the security of the common people. Think of it.