Lothar Wicke, the clinical director of the Rudolfinerhaus clinic when Yushchenko was first tested, has broken his silence on the bizarre dioxin poisoning case as reported by
The Telegraph of London.
Dr Wicke said: "I was directly involved, and I can tell you that the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Vienna did not find any traces of poisonous agents in his blood. If there is no poison, there cannot be poisoning and there was no trace of it whatsoever."
Later, with Wicke out of the way, it was claimed that Yushchenko had the second highest dioxin level ever reported.
When Dr. Wicke cast doubt on early poisoning rumors in September, he received death threats and reportedly resigned because he had the
"his children to think about".
The Telegraph again:
A man speaking accented English rang Dr Wicke and introduced himself as "a friend from the Ukraine". He said the man told him to "take care. Your life is in danger". Dr Wicke and his family were then put under 24-hour police guard...
Dr Wicke, who had worked there for 25 years and was awarded the Cross of Honour First Class for Science and Art by the late Austrian president, Thomas Klestil.
Wicke dismisses claims that his resignation was voluntary.
"The official announcement said I left of my own free will but that wasn't the case."
Yushchenko's doctor, one Nikolai Korpan, disputes this, but Soj's source has plenty of questions on Korpan.
I asked him about Korpan, whom I first met in Vienna in 1990 or 1991. My friend told me that Korpan was a charlatan and had to be thrown out of my guy's establishment for incompetence. Korpan claims to be a professor and flashes the title whenever he can. He is not an Austrian professor and he is likely not a professor in Uzhgorod (as he claims on his web CV). Originally from Ivano-Frankivsk, he did graduate from medical school in Kiev but could not - or would not - sit the "nostrification" exams in Austria in order to be recognized as a surgeon there. [Much MORE]
Meanwhile the NYT
has reported that the SBU chief (Ukrainian KGB) alleged to have poisoned Yushchenko:
- Was working for Yushchenko clandestinely
- had hosted Yushchenko for dinner after the putative poisoning
- that Yushchenko gave the SBU chief and suspected poisoner his own personally hand-painted landscape paintings.
General Smeshko left the meeting with Mr. Kuchma and headed to a S.B.U. safe house in Kiev for a secret liaison with Mr. Yushchenko, the opposition leader.
The meeting had self-evident ironies. Mr. Yushchenko, nearly incapacitated after being poisoned by dioxin in the summer, a crime that remains unsolved, had publicly linked the poisoning to a meeting with General Smeshko...
Mr. Yushchenko, who is an amateur artist, gave General Smeshko one of his landscape paintings. The spy chief and the opposition leader embraced.
Thus goes the story of the Ukrainian "October" surprise. The story of how wealthy out-of-favor bureaucrats aligned with the West against wealthy in-power bureaucrats aligned with the Kremlin to influence an election where the electorate was evenly split to advance the Brzezinski Doctrine, "A Blueprint for World Dictatorship," Says a Former German Defense and NATO Official.
"...Hence, support for the new post-Soviet states - for geopolitical pluralism in the space of the former Soviet empire - has to be an integral part of a policy designed to induce Russia to exercise unambiguously its European option. Among these states. Three are geopolitically especially important: Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine." (p. 121)
It follows that America's primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it." (p148)
Hal C.