KIEV, Sept. 11 – Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was in a “great” mood after spending five hours at the Prosecutor General’s Office Thursday questioned in connection with the 2004 poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, Tymoshenko’s spokeswoman said.

“She was in a normal, great mood,” Maryna Soroka, Tymoshenko’s spokeswoman, told reporters.

Tymoshenko refused to speak to reporters after the questioning. She will have to show up for interrogation again on Sept. 16, investigators said.

But shortly before the questioning Thursday, Tymoshenko suggested Yushchenko’s poisoning had not been a proven fact, the same allegation that had been recently used by Yushchenko’s other foes.

“What I think is worth to be done by the Prosecutor General’s Office - if it wants to find out the truth – is to ask the president of Ukraine and to appeal to the best European laboratory, get experts from all countries that have the same labs, and to publicly make the analysis, to prove everything, and only after that to drag people for interrogation,” Tymoshenko said.

This was the second time that Tymoshenko has been interrogated in connection with the poisoning of Yushchenko, the investigators said. The first interrogation has never been publicly reported.

The questioning of Tymoshenko, who was Yushchenko’s ally in the 2004 Orange Revolution, is a new twist in the investigation that seeks to solve one of the biggest mysteries in Ukraine’s modern history of Ukraine: Who poisoned Yushchenko in September 2004?

The poisoning nearly killed Yushchenko, a pro-Western opposition leader who ran against then-Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, a candidate backed by Moscow, during the campaign that had led to the presidential election in November 2004.

Yushchenko survived after an intensive treatment at a hospital in Vienna in September 2004, but his face had remained disfigured and deeply scarred with what has been later confirmed as severe dioxin poisoning.

Tymoshenko’s suggestion that the poisoning of Yushchenko must yet be proven repeats earlier allegation, made by David Zhvania, a former close ally of Yushchenko.

Zhvania, who arranged the dinner with SBU security service officials on Sept. 5 2004, at which Yushchenko is believed to have been poisoned, has been persistently refusing to testify. He used his lawmaker immunity status to skip interrogation on Thursday.

Tests performed at the Free University in Amsterdam in December 2004 showed the level of dioxin in Yushchenko’s blood was 100,000 units per gram of blood, compared with between 15 and 45 units that is considered to be the norm.

Most of what is known about the health effects of acute dioxin poisoning comes from experiments on animals. Most animals would die from the levels found in Yushchenko in December 2004, scientists have said.

But Zhvania went into spotlight several weeks ago when he had suddenly stated that Yushchenko’s mysterious illness was a simple case of food poisoning. This allegation was rejected by doctors that had treated Yushchenko as non-sense.

Rostyslav Valikhnovskiy, Yushchenko’s personal doctor, said Thursday numerous tests have been conducted and all had showed a substantial amount of dioxin in Yushchenko’s blood.

In a statement, Valikhnovskiy cited “more than 10 tests” conducted in different labs in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Britain, that had independently showed a similar level of dioxin in Yushchenko’s blood.

Additionally, separate tests have been carried out at the request of the Prosecutor General Office involving 15 international experts, including from the U.S., Germany and Japan, in May 2006.

“The fact of dioxin poisoning of the president has been proven unconditionally,” Valikhnovskiy said. (tl/ez)