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TITLE: Russian Freedoms Group Reports 16 Journalists Killed in 2000 |
AUTHOR: |
PUB: Nando Times |
DATE: January 13, 2001 |
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Sixteen Russian journalists died on assignment last year, the same number as the year before, a report said Saturday. The report released by the Glasnost Protection Fund, a group supporting freedom of expression, came out as journalists marked Russian Press Day, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency. Boris Timoshenko, chief of the fund's monitoring service, told ITAR-Tass that on the eve of Russian Press Day, the apartment of an editor of the Volzhskoye Vremya newspaper in the Tver region northwest of Moscow was fired on by unidentified gunmen. The editor, Fyodor Penkin, was unharmed in the attack, which Timoshenko said was an attempt at intimidation following publication of articles on drug trafficking and shady deals at a local distillery. A total of 16 journalists were killed while on assignment in 2000, the same number as 1999, the fund said. The most prominent were Artyom Borovik, the head of the Top Secret media holding company who died in an air crash that the report described as mysterious and Igor Domnikov, who worked for Moscow's muckraking Novaya Gazeta and was fatally beaten with a hammer by an unknown attacker. According to the report, journalists were attacked on 73 separate occasions last year. Timoshenko told ITAR-Tass that the statistics were not complete, and the number of violations of the rights of media workers was much higher, especially in Russian regions where many journalists were reluctant to report them for fear of retaliation. President Vladimir Putin, marking Russian Press Day, said freedom of the press was one of the last decade's major achievements. "You sometimes have to give your lives for an ability to write truthfully and objectively," Putin said in a statement released by the Kremlin press office. "A reporter's job remains to be one of the most dangerous and journalists are often the first to withstand arbitrary rule and lawlessness," the president said. END |