by Anya Tsukanova
KIEV - Ukraine's ex-president Leonid Kuchma is expected to be questioned this week over the grisly murder of an opposition reporter, after his former interior minister implicated in the killing was found dead in what police have called a suicide.
The former president cut short a vacation in the Czech Republic to return to Kiev Saturday, a day after his onetime interior minister Yury Kravchenko was found dead just hours before he was due to answer prosecutors' questions over the 2000 killing of investigative reporter Georgy Gongadze.
The journalist's gruesome death became a symbol of the rampant corruption within Kuchma's regime, sparked widespread opposition that eventually led to its downfall late last year, and is now threatening some of its most senior members.
Although prosecutors have not yet said whether they will summon Kuchma, many observers expect the former leader -- who was implicated in the killing in recordings that his former bodyguard smuggled out of the country -- to eventually be questioned.
"It's very likely that Kuchma will be questioned," said Andriy Yermolayev, a political analyst.
Gongadze, who had been critical of Kuchma in articles in his Internet newspaper, Ukrainska Pravda, disappeared in September 2000 and his headless body was found two months later.
The murder triggered widespread anger at the government that culminated in last year's "orange revolution" protests that brought to power opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko -- a Kuchma opponent who nearly died from poisoning during the election campaign.
Yushchenko has made solving Gongadze's murder one of the top priorities of his administration.
Kuchma was implicated in the death after his former bodyguard Mykola Melnichenko released tapes that allegedly had recorded Kuchma, in between epithets, ordering Kravchenko to take care of the persistent investigative reporter.
Kuchma has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and has called the tapes a fabrication. On Friday he said he was innocent "before God, before the people and before my conscience."
Meanwhile speculation swirled in Ukraine over whether Kravchenko, who was found dead with two shots to his head at his elite country home on the morning he was due to appear at the prosecutor's office to answer questions in the Gongadze case, killed himself as police insist.
Police said Kravchenko died after shooting himself twice -- first in the chin and then in the temple -- and left a note laying the blame for the Gongadze murder on Kuchma.
"I am not guilty of anything," police have quoted the note as saying. "I have become a victim of political intrigues of president Kuchma and his entourage. I am leaving you with a clear conscience."
But many observers have raised doubts over the official version.
"I knew Yury Kravchenko personally," Melnichenko told AFP by phone from Poland. "I don't believe that he could willfully take his life."
Melnichenko, who hid in Europe for months after the release of the tapes before receiving political asylum in the US, said he feared for his life after he heard about Kravchenko's murder while on a visit to Poland, where he said he was due to meet top Ukrainian officials.
"There was always a danger to my life and right now it has increased," he said.
One of the theories going around Kiev is that Kravchenko -- who served as Kuchma's interior minister from 1995 to 2001 -- was killed because he knew too much.
"Kravchenko was ready to carry out any order by Kuchma," Yermolayev said. "Kravchenko's death played toward the thesis that Kuchma commandeered and Kravchenko organized (the killing)."
03/06/2005 12:33 GMT