Yushchenko victim of poison-gas assault

Doctors as detectives
by Michael Frank
S?ddeutsche Zeitung, 13 December 2004
www.sueddeutsche.de/ausland/artikel/559/44515
[translated by Julia L?tsch for UKL]

Threats, intrigues, political pressure: How Vienna doctors nonetheless came up with clear results.

In the end, the Ukrainian national anthem was sung. With this, a choir from L'viv, which had come to Vienna to participate in a singers' meetings, bid farewell to the Ukrainian presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko in the hospital on Sunday. After that, the politician wanted to take a stroll across the Christmas market before leaving for his home country and the election on December 26.

He returns home with the certitude that someone wanted to kill him. The doctors of the Rudolfinerhaus, a renowned private clinic in Austria's capital, have made the clear diagnosis: Yushchenko has highly toxic dioxin in his blood and tissue, the level is more than a thousand times as high as what is considered tolerable. This is also the reason for the disfigurement of his fact through chlorine acne. Michael Zimpfer, head of the supervisory board of the Rudolfinerhaus, remarked earlier: "We close with the additional diagnosis of suspicion of third party fault". Yushchenko is able to work. However, the convalescence process can last years. Who knows whether the damage to his skin will ever completely heal? The doctors say that it is possible, but not certain.

"I am very happy to be alive and I thank these people here", the patient said, mainly addressing the attending physician Nikolai Korpan, who is of Ukrainian background. Consequentially, the Ukrainian Public Persecutor's Department took up the investigation on the weekend. Already during his first and second stay in Vienna in September and October rumours of poisoning had circulated. The victim himself had filed a report, however, the authorities in Kyiv had closed the file after a month.

The Vienna doctors Korpan and Zimpfer stated now that the patient could have been given a combination-poison. The fact that only dioxin could be detected does not necessarily mean that there were no other substances involved. To give this to somebody undetected would already be possible with a simple cream soup.

Already in the beginning the suspicion was voiced that the opposition leader had been poisoned during a dinner with the head of the Ukrainian secret service, Ihor Smeshko, who sides with Yushchenko's political enemies. Michael Zimpfer also tried to explain why the diagnosis "poisoning" had taken such a long time. It had been a very difficult course of disease which had "never been observed before".

Through the oral taking of the poison the clinical picture had been very different. So far only cases had been known where dioxin had been inhaled. Nonetheless, the suspicion of poisoning had already come up during the first diagnosis of the clinic. A protocol of this kind does exist which had actually been confiscated by the authorities for a while. This protocol had been signed by Lothar Wicke, the medical head of the Rudolfinerhaus.
Wicke claimed later that he had not noted the suspicion of poisoning - and at the same time he made his office available.

Wicke as well as Nikolai Korpan who treated Yushchenko received anonymous threats which made police protection necessary. However, it was never really clear for whom in Ukraine the truth about the poisoning attempt would be so awkward that he retorted to such massive threatening gestures on foreign territory. However, it is certain that the diagnosing process in the Rudolfinerhaus was slowed down due to pressure from outside. The hospital became the pivot of the dirty Ukrainian presidential election. The statement of the Vienna doctors seems accordingly fearless: poison.

By now Austria's doctors have had a routine when it comes to saving lives of prominent Central European politicians. Apart from their own president Thomas Klestil whom they twice snatched from death, they were also successful with Vaclav Havel from the Czech Republic and Rudolf Schuster from Slovakia.

Maybe this is the reasons why the rescued Ukrainian opposition leader Yushchenko returns home full of confidence. Characterizing the situation in Ukraine he stated: "We have not had anything like this during the past 100 years. It would be appropriate to compare this to the end of the Soviet Union or the fall of the Berlin wall."