KIEV, June 1 - RAPSI. The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office is likely to close the criminal case on the poisoning of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko in 2004, Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka said in an interview with Focus magazine on Friday.

The office has sufficient grounds to do this, he said.

"I personally am in favor of the investigation coming to an end. We have every right to close the case as Yushchenko has not taken the blood test. But then they'll say we closed the case before he took the blood test and the red tape will start all over again. So this is why we will wait patiently until the end of the year, after which the case will most likely be closed," Pshonka said.

Yushchenko said that he refuses to take a second blood test at a Ukrainian laboratory as he believes the results are unlikely to be objective.

On September 5, 2004, Yushchenko, at that time a candidate for the presidency, met with the Ukrainian Security Service's management. After the meeting, he began to feel unwell and on September 10 he was hospitalized.

Doctors said that Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxins and that the poisoning had taken place five days before he was hospitalized. Yushenko later underwent a whole series of tests. A second round of tests in May 2006 verified that there was dioxins in Yushchenko's blood.

Pshonka has repeatedly claimed that a further analysis of Yushchnko's blood must be made as part of the investigation. In December 2010 Pshonka did not exclude the possibility that Yushcehnko was not actually poisoned in 2004. In January and February 2011, Yushchenko was interrogated by the Prosecutor Generals Office with regard to his poisoning.