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Bakiyev denies that Lukashenka has appointed him director of a Belarusian defense industry plant

Kurmanbek Bakiyev has denied media reports that Alyaksandr Lukashenka has appointed him director general of a defense industry plant in Belarus.

In an interview with Interfax Zapad on Friday, Mr. Bakiyev dismissed the reports as fiction and a media hoax.

“I see no sense in commenting on such allegations because they are fully false,” he said.

The ousted president of Kyrgyzstan still stays in Belarus despite the new Kyrgyz authorities’ repeated requests for his extradition. He fled Kyrgyzstan after being overthrown and resurfaced in Minsk in late April 2010. He was offered refuge by by the Belarusian leader, who said later that he had received Kurmanbek Bakiyev as a head of state, not as an outlaw.

The Kyrgyz authorities wanted Mr. Bakiyev to stand trial for allegedly sanctioning gunfire on a crowd of protesters that left more than 80 people dead. In mid-September, they said that they would try Mr. Bakiyev in absentia.

In an interview with Reuters in early May, Mr. Lukashenka made it clear that he would reject an extradition request for Mr. Bakiyev. “Such a request would be hopeless and humiliating for the interim government [in Kyrgyzstan],” he said. “The president of Kyrgyzstan is under the protection of the Belarusian state and its president.”

Mr. Lukashenka told reporters following a summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization in Moscow on December 10 that he had not discussed the fate of Kurmanbek Bakiyev with the new Kyrgyz president, Roza Otunbayeva, during the summit.

"If he is a former [president], what is there to discuss?" Russia's RIA Novosti quoted Mr. Lukashenka as saying. "We didn't talk with Roza Isaakovna at all about Bakiyev."