Wanna' be a Russian journalist? I gotta' deal on a program!

Monday, March 5, 2007. Issue 3608. Page 1.

Journalist Plummets to His Death

By Natalya Krainova
Staff Writer

Itar-Tass
Ivan Safronov in a 2005 photograph

A Kommersant journalist who covered military affairs and had more than once angered government officials fell to his death Friday from a fifth-floor window of the apartment building where he lived.

Prosecutors said suicide was the likeliest explanation for the death of Ivan Safronov, a retired colonel who was a columnist at the daily newspaper for more than 10 years. But Safronov's colleagues and neighbors were skeptical he would take his own life.

Safronov's body was discovered at the entrance to his building on Nizhegorodskaya Ulitsa 9, in southeast Moscow.

Kommersant journalist Konstantin Lantratov, who knew Safronov for 15 years, said in an interview that he could not think of a person "more cheerful" than his former colleague. "Anybody else could do that but him," Lantratov said, referring to talk of a possible suicide.

Safronov fell from the window upside down, Lantratov said, adding that that would not have happened if he had jumped of his own volition. "This could mean he was knocked unconscious and then pushed out the window," he said.

Kommersant editor in chief Andrei Vasilyev told NTV that Safronov was "absolutely not capable" of killing himself. "He was a real colonel," Vasilyev said. "He was so good. Everyone in the office loved him."


Safronov had had run-ins with the Federal Security Service over allegations that he disclosed classified information in his articles. "But they always ended well because Safronov used publicly available information and was able to prove that to FSB officers," Lantratov said.

Lantratov said the FSB questioned Safronov last year over a story about the Samara-based TsSKB-Progress, the manufacturer of the Soyuz-ST rocket. Agents wanted to know where the columnist had unearthed some sensitive data. Once Safronov showed them the Internet site where he got his facts, the FSB dropped its case, Lantratov said.

Lantratov said he last spoke with Safronov on Tuesday.

Safronov lived on the third floor of the five-story, brick building. Police believe he died around 4 p.m., a time of day when few people are home.

Anna Shcherbakova, 25, who lives on the fifth floor, said police visited her apartment at about 7 p.m. She said she returned home at about 3:30 in the afternoon and did not notice anything.

Police also questioned other building residents.

Lyubov Grigoryeva, who lives in the apartment directly above Safronov's, on the fourth floor, said she was in her kitchen reading at 4 p.m. but did not hear anything.

The entrance to Grigoryeva's apartment is a half-flight of stairs below the window from which he fell. She added that a dog living on the fifth floor barks at the slightest noise, but on Friday afternoon, she said, she heard no barking at the time when Safronov is thought to have tumbled to his death.

Raisa Belova, 70, another resident, said she found it strange that Safronov had walked up two floors above his apartment, dressed as if he were about to go outside and apparently carrying a bag of mandarins.

"He was completely dressed, wearing a coat and his cap," Belova said.

Belova said she saw a bag of scattered mandarins near Safronov's dead body when she came back from church.

Prosecutors at the Tagansky district office, which is handling the case, could not be reached for comment Sunday. Spokesman Alexei Kravchuk said in televised comments Saturday that investigators considered suicide the most likely explanation for Safronov's death.

Funeral arrangements were tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, Lantratov said.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/storie...03/05/002.html

Is this the killer of Russian journalist?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../wrussia09.xml

By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Last Updated: 1:56am BST 10/10/2006

Russia's best known investigative journalist was murdered two days before she was due to publish a scathing report on torture by Russian agents in Chechnya, it emerged yesterday, as outrage spread around the world.


Suspect: the tall man in a baseball cap is caught on CCTV
As messages poured in for Anna Politkovskaya, who became famous for her withering criticism of President Vladimir Putin's war in Chechnya, Russian activists struggled to assess the disturbing implications of her killing for the future of their country.
The US State Department said it was "shocked and profoundly saddened" by what appeared to be at least the 13th contract killing of a journalist since Mr Putin took power in 2000. European governments expressed similar sentiments.
But from the Kremlin there was silence. Not even speculation on websites that Politkovskaya's death was a birthday present for Mr Putin, who was 54 on Saturday, the day she was killed, could provoke a government reaction.
Among the thousand or so protesters at vigils in Moscow and St Petersburg, there was no doubt that someone in the Kremlin knew something about the reporter's death.
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The words scrawled across the giant photograph of Politkovskaya in Pushkin Square, Moscow, said it all: "The Kremlin has killed freedom of speech."
A portrait of Mr Putin bore the words: "You are responsible for everything."
Politkovskaya's newspaper, the bi-weekly Novaya Gazeta, which is partly owned by the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, was due to run her latest Chechnyan expose.
Although she had not filed her article, the deputy chief editor, Vitaly Yaroshevsky, said it lifted the lid on torture and kidnapping of civilians by officers loyal to Chechnya's Moscow-backed prime minister Ramzan Kadyrov.


Anna Politkovskaya made many powerful enemies in the FSB
Mr Kadyrov, 30, a protégé of Mr Putin, was one of Politkovskaya's foremost enemies. She was to testify against him in a case over the kidnapping and killing of two civilians. Politkovskaya, 48, was shot twice at close range as she returned to her flat from shopping. The mother of two was found in the lift, with a 9mm Makarov pistol by her side.
CCTV showed a man, in black and with a baseball cap, hurrying from the building.
Politkovskaya made many powerful enemies in the FSB, the spy agency that succeeded the KGB, over scores of trips to Chechnya that exposed Russian brutality in the province and detailed the horrific conditions of ordinary Russian soldiers there.
She received many threats and survived an alleged attempt to poison her tea on a flight in 2004.
Her son regularly checked her car for bombs and she knew death was a possibility. "If it happens, it happens," she told The Daily Telegraph this summer. Last December, she told a conference on press freedom: "People sometimes pay with their lives for saying out loud what they think."


Russian soldiers interrogate a captured chechen fighter
Few are confident a police investigation will uncover the truth. No other journalist's murder in the past six years has been solved.
But the killing of so famous a figure, two weeks after the murder of the reforming deputy head of the central bank, Andrei Kozlov, has convinced some that hard-liners in the Kremlin have begun to act with impunity as 2008 presidential elections draw closer.
"Those who killed her were absolutely convinced that it is now possible in Russia to do such things openly, without even bothering to camouflage it as an accident," said a former dissident, Sergey Grigoryants.
adrian@telegraphmoscow.com

(my emphasis on contract killing)