Vienna  - Sports manager Stefan Matschiner has told Austrian investigators that he supplied cyclist Bernhard Kohl and other athletes with doping substances, the Austrian Press Agency APA reported late Friday.

Matschiner, who was taken into custody in Monday, reportedly told the authorities that he supplied the blood booster EPO, testosterone and Human Growth Hormone.

APA said that Matschiner's lawyer did not dismiss this information as false.

The report said that Matschiner also implicated a Vienna blood bank, Humanplasma, which had been mentioned before in the doping scheme.

Matschiner's lawyer, Franz Essl, said that Matschiner had not tempted the athletes to use forbidden performance-enhancing substances, bur rather told them to use lesser quantities.

Kohl was stripped of his third-place finish at the 2008 Tour de France when retests of his samples in autumn revealed that he used the latest generation of EPO which is known as CERA. Triathlete Lisa Huetthaler has also been caught doping.

Both athletes have confessed to doping and implicated Matschiner.

Former cross-country ski coach Walter Mayer, a Vienna pharmacist and a cyclist are other suspects in the case.

Austrian authorities started to crack down on doping in January, when a specialized police unit was formed. Doping is a criminal offence in Austria under laws passed in 2008.

Vienna prosecutors also said on Friday that they arrested five persons on charges of drug dealing over the past weeks, but did not link them with the Matschiner case. (dpa)