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Ex-Ukraine leader hires star US lawyer in murder case

Ukraine's ex-president Leonid Kuchma hired a star US lawyer who worked on the O.J. Simpson trial to act as an advisor in his defence against charges over the murder of a reporter, his team said Monday.

Alan Dershowitz has "joined as a special advisor for the team" representing Kuchma after the ex-president was last week charged of involvement in the murder of critical Ukrainian journalist Georgy Gongadze in 2000.

The hiring was the latest dramatic twist in a process that has caused a sensation in Ukraine, where opponents of Kuchma for over a decade campaigned to no avail for the 1994-2005 president to be brought to trial for the murder.

The headless body of Gongadze, who founded the opposition Ukrainska Pravda website and was a virulent critic of Kuchma, was found in a forest outside Kiev after he disappeared in September 2000.

"I look forward to contributing my experience as a defence lawyer and specialist on forensic evidence to this case," Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard Law School, said in a statement from Kuchma's team.

Attending his latest questioning at the prosecutors' office in Kiev, Kuchma confirmed that Dershowitz was part of his team but added he had not yet met the US lawyer and was also working with Ukrainian lawyer Igor Fomin.

"I am ready to go through this for the sake of one fundamental goal -- the truth. Because I do not need the truth but Ukraine does," he told reporters.

Kuchma said he was ready to "swear on the constitution and the bible as many times as you want that I did not give the order for that crime and could not."

Crucial in the case against Kuchma are recordings made by a bodyguard where voices alleged to be of the former president and two other top officials evoke eliminating Gongadze.

Opening the criminal case against Kuchma last week, Ukrainian prosecutors for the first time ruled that the recordings were admissible evidence.

But Dershowitz cast doubt on their reliability.

"I am especially committed to the search for truth in this case," he said, adding that it is "relatively easy to change the words on a digital recording to create guilty sounding statements."

He said that the case "should be closed immediately, to not further reinforce the impression that the actions of the legal system may be politically motivated."

Kuchma said outside the prosecutors' office that he did not know Gongadze personally and had only seen him once at a television debate. He said Gongadze was not a reporter but a "manager".

President Viktor Yanukovych, meanwhile, said that the process was "natural" as Ukraine needed to find answers to "all the questions" over what happened 10 years ago but denied there was anything political about the charges.

"No-one is going to envy him (Kuchma) but at some point we need to finish with this," Yanukovych said on a visit to Singapore, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.

Dershowitz, whose legal career has spanned a half century, was an advisor to the defence team of former American football star and actor O.J. Simpson in his 1995 murder trial.

The authorities in 2009 arrested ex-interior ministry official Olexy Pukach and he confessed to personally strangling the journalist with his belt and beheading him with an axe.

Prosecutors had previously said former interior minister Yury Kravchenko ordered the murder but Gongadze's supporters have long alleged that higher forces were involved.

Kravchenko committed suicide in 2005, according to the official version, although some observers still claim he may have been murdered.