Ihor Maryinkov, a witness in a criminal case on the murder of MP Yevhen Scherban, said in his free testimony on Wednesday that he saw former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko meeting with the leaders of the Kushnir-Riabin gang, who organized Scherban's killing.

In particular, he said that since 1994 he had lived at the Natsionalny Hotel in Kyiv where he rented three rooms, and where Tymoshenko lived at that time. The witness said that on several occasions he met with Yevhen Kushnir (the leader of the Kushnir-Riabin gang that prepared and committed the murder of MPs Vadym Hetman and Scherban).

In the spring of 2006, according to Maryinkov, the entourage of Kushnir and Riabin (a co-leader of the gang) stropped at the hotel when Tymoshenko lived in room No. 810.

"I met [crime lord in Dnipropetrovsk Oleksandr] Milchenko, Kushnir and Tymoshenko [in the hotel]... I asked Kushnir what kind of relationship he maintains with Tymoshenko, and Kushnir said that Tymoshenko and [former Prime Minister Pavlo] Lazarenko are like one in the same thing," Maryinkov said.

He said that he had heard that "Yulia will resolve all financial problems."

"After a while I realized that these were contract killings," the witness said.

Maryinkov said that he was arrested on January 28, 1999 and that he said the same thing during three trials.

"I had not invented anything," he said.

He said that if the name of Tymoshenko was not earlier mentioned, "there were certain reasons for that."

The witness said that he saw Lazarenko and Tymoshenko "as a whole".

In general, an Interfax-Ukraine reporter said, the witness's free testimony was sufficiently confused and not chronological. In his free testimony Maryinkov moved from one thought to another.

The witness did not clearly point to Tymoshenko's guilt in anything and mostly referred to the words of others, rather than what he personally heard.