Ukraine's budding opposition hailed reports Sunday that President Leonid Kuchma has sacked his interior minister over alleged involvement in the murder of dissident reporter Georgy Gongadze.
It appeared to signal Kuchma's first symbolic concession to weeks of street protests in Ukraine.
Saturday's reports by the ITAR-TASS agency that Kuchma had actually dismissed Yuri Kravchenko still received no official confirmation Sunday.
Like Kuchma, Kravchenko has been accused by the opposition of involvement in the murder of Gongadze, who wrote for a Communist-linked Internet newspaper.
Vlodimir Chemeris, one of the organizers of the campaign to oust Kuchma, pronounced himself satisfied with reports that Kravchenko had been fired.
"Kuchma has met one of our demands. This is a positive step," said Chemeris.
Kravchenko, formerly one of Kuchma's closest allies, will be replaced by Kiev police chief Yuri Smirnov, ITAR-TASS said.
Chemeris insisted however that dialogue was impossible with the authorities until chief prosecutor Mikhailo Potebenko had also been sacked.
Potebenko initially refused to accept that a headless, acid-burnt body discovered last November was Gongadze's, despite DNA tests carried out in January by Russian experts that positively identified him.
Although he changed his position after a second set of tests were performed in February, his behavior prompted accusations from opposition politicians that he was deliberately dragging his feet in the case.
On Friday, Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko called for a full inquiry into the Gongadze murder but rejected accusations that the president was involved.
"The authorities must ... do everything possible to ensure that an in-depth inquiry is carried out into the journalist's disappearance," he said.
Thousands have joined in protests in recent days in several Ukrainian towns to demand that the interior minister be sacked.
The scandal linking Kuchma to Gongadze's disappearance was sparked by a tape recording released by one of Kuchma's former bodyguards, in which he allegedly orders the killing.
"Morally, I do not admit that the president of the country could be implicated in the disappearance of Georgy Gongadze," said Yushchenko. "It would be a tragedy for me."
Kuchma has dismissed the recording, saying the tape had been doctored to incriminate him.
He says he is the victim of a political plot and has repeatedly rejected calls by opposition politicians for him to stand down.
Independent experts from the Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI) examined the recording last February, but could neither prove that it was genuine nor dismiss it as a fake.
The journalist's headless and charred corpse was found last November but only identified in January by scientists using DNA tests – KIEV (AFP)
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