Head of the President’s Administration acknowledges that the ten Uzbeks were deported at Karimov’s request and with procedural violations
Oleh Rybachuk, Head of the President’s Administration, has admitted that the deportation of 10 Uzbek citizens from the territory of Ukraine on 14 February was carried out with infringements of procedure in that the Uzbeks were not allowed 7 days in which to appeal the decision of the court to extradite them.
At the same time, in an interview given to the newspaper “Sevodnya” [“Today”], published on Wednesday, he claimed that the extradition itself had been correct.
“They belonged to a radical Islamic group, the name of which unfortunately I can’t say”, Rybachuk stated, referring to information received from the Head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), Ihor Drizhchany.
He also said that he had said the “so-called credit history” of those Uzbeks and there had been grounds for deporting them. Rybachuk also directly confirmed that the extradition of the Uzbek citizens had been requested by the government of Islam Karimov.
When asked whether the law had after all been broken, Rybachuk answered that the point was possibly in the fact that the Head of the Crimean SSU, Major General Viktor Kozhelyanko, had not had time to fully come to grips with his position and had made a hasty decision.
Kozhelyanko was previously in charge of a special subdivision of the SSU on fighting terrorism, and he officially took up his position on 7 February, when he was formally presented by the Head of the SSU, Ihor Drizhchany.
In this interview, Rybachuk also complained that over the story with the deportation of the Uzbek citizens,
15.03.2006
http://pravda.com.ua