The Ukrainian Security Service (USS) has detained in Dnepropetrovsk Yuri Desyatsky, a masseur who was searched for under a criminal case on the poisoning of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, USS press secretary Marina Ostapenko said, according to Itar-Tass.
She told reporters Friday that the USS had established the whereabouts of Desyatsky.
He was interrogated and freed. Only investigators of the Prosecutor General’s Office have the right to make comments on the poisoning case, Ostapenko said.
Prosecutor General Alexander Medvedko earlier said that two people figured in the case, including the masseur, who left Kiev in last year’s September and was looked for by law enforcement agencies.
According to investigators, Desyatsky massaged Yushchenko on September 4, 2004, on the eve of his possible poisoning.
Desyatsky allegedly saw symptoms of Yushchenko’s disease on the day of massage.
Yushchenko believes that he was poisoned on September 5 in the country house of one of USS chiefs.
A director of the Geneva University Dermatology Clinic, who is also Yushchenko’s physician, recently said that about 80 percent of dioxin was eliminated from the body of Yushchenko.
However, the director of the Russian-Vietnamese Tropical Centre, Vladimir Rumak, said that he studied effects of dioxins on human health during 30 years and never saw a case of such rapid elimination of these substances from the organism.
“It is just unrealistic over two years,” he said, adding that there are no methods for removal of dioxin from the body.
“It is practically impossible to retrieve dioxin that has accumulated in the fatty tissue,” Rumak said.
