Russia

A court in the Moscow suburb of Khimki on Wednesday convicted Mikhail Beketov, the editor of the independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda, of criminally slandering Khimki's mayor, Vladimir Strelchenko, in a 2007 television interview. Beketov, who is in a wheelchair and unable to speak two years after a near-lethal attack, was wheeled into the courtroom for the verdict. Judge Arkady Khalatov...

Violent attacks have been carried out against two journalists in the Moscow region. Both victims, Oleg Kashin of the business daily Kommersant and Anatoly Adamchuk of the independent weekly Zhukovskiye Vesti, have covered a contentious highway project that would go through a forest in the Moscow suburb of Khimki, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Kashin worked...

Four years after Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed by an unknown assailant in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow her killers have yet to be brought to justice. Repeatedly criticised by rights groups over its handling of the case, the Russian government recently announced it was reinvigorating the investigation, and those involving 18 other...

Detectives with the federal Investigative Committee, the Russian agency responsible for investigating serious crimes, say they are probing a widening circle of suspects in the 2006 murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Agency officials made the disclosure during a September 28 meeting in Moscow with a delegation from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)...

Top Russian investigators have pledged to pursue 19 cases of murdered journalists presented to them by a delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists, reopening several closed cases and pursuing new leads in a number of other probes. The CPJ delegation, led by board member Kati Marton and CPJ Chairman Paul Steiger, met Tuesday with Aleksandr Bastrykin, chairman of the Investigative...

Russian police, some armed and masked, raided a prominent opposition magazine on Thursday as part of an unspecified investigation. The three-hour raid on the New Times, an independent Moscow-based weekly, was carried out by armed and masked police officers led by Col Stanislav Pashkovsky, the head of the General Directorate of Internal Affairs (GUVD) for the Moscow region, who wanted to identify...

It was the phrase "with opprobrious underworld connotations" that Viktor Biryukov, chief press spokesman for the Moscow police, used to explain the reasons for a business reputation protection claim lodged against the newspaper Noviye Izvestia (NI). The claim filing followed a January 2010 series of NI articles citing complaints by residents of the (now partially destroyed) village of Rechnik, on...

The head of a news agency and his deputy have been missing for a week in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, a republic in the Russian Caucasus. Khuda-Media director Abubark Rizvanov and his deputy, Timur Kurbanmagomedov, went missing after leaving their office at 4 p.m. on August 20 to buy a printer cartridge. After they failed to return, their colleagues tried to call them on their mobile...

Magomedvagif Sultanmagomedov, a Muslim scholar who was the head of Makhachkala TV and the Nurul Irshad (Light of Truth) publishing house in Dagestan in the Russian Caucasus was murdered on August 11, according to delayed reports. Sultanmagomedov was fatally injured when unidentified gunmen fired on him as he was driving his car in the centre of Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital, and died a few hours...

The Russian interior ministry has carried out raids on news media and journalists as part of its investigation into an attack on an administrative building in Khimki, a satellite town on Moscow’s northern outskirts, by hundreds of protesters on the night of July 28, Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Representatives of the interior ministry’s Moscow region investigating...