The convicted murderer of Ukrainian lawmaker Yevhen Shcherban would not give false testimony implicating jailed former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko in the killing, his lawyer has said.
Ukraine's deputy prosecutor Renat Kuzmin said earlier this month there was evidence that Tymoshenko and another former prime minister, Pavlo Lazarenko, had paid for the 1996 murder of powerful businessman Shcherban.
Shcherban was shot dead with his wife at an airport in eastern Ukraine.
But Vadim Bolotskikh, who was jailed for life in 2002 for the murder, said he would "not give false testimony," his lawyer Dmitry Poezd told the Zerkalo Nedevli. Ukraina magazine.
Tymoshenko's Batkyvshyna party has alleged Bolotskikh, who is a Russian national, was under increasing pressure from the Ukrainian prosecutors.
"He is waiting to be transferred to Russia," Poezd said in an interview published on Saturday. "He understands... that he will remain alive until he implicates Lazarenko and Tymoshenko."
Tymoshenko said the allegations against her were "absurd."
The heroine of Ukraine's 2004 pro-democracy Orange revolution was jailed for seven years for abuse of office at a controversial trial in October 2011.
Tymoshenko denies wrongdoing and says her trial was political revenge by President Viktor Yanukovich.
The United States and the European Union have condemned her trial as politically motivated.
She is currently serving her sentence in Kachanivska prison, near Ukraine's second largest city of Kharkiv.
