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 the sources for a February exposé on riot police corruption and abuses.
Col Pashkovsky was after the recordings of interviews that members of the OMON riot police gave anonymously to reporter Ilya Barabanov for the story entitled “OMON Slaves,” which has been the subject of an interior ministry libel suit since April. Barabanov is the winner of this year's Peter Mackler Award for Courageous and Ethical Journalism, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF).
During the raid, the New Times editor Yevgenia Albats agreed to give Pashkovsky a transcript of the interviews but refused to name the sources or surrender the recordings, which would have allowed the police to identify the sources. The grounds she gave for refusing were article 41 of the media law, which protects journalists' sources.
“We will not betray the people who entrust us with information,” she said, adding that there was no doubt that “the leading goal of this operation was to scare the journalists of the New Times and other news media.”
RSF reiterated its support for the New Times and all its staff, who have a record of doing major investigative stories on subjects of great public interest, the very essence of quality journalism. It also condemned the Moscow region GUVD's repeated raids aimed at forcing Kommersant, Svobodnaya Pressa, Gazeta.ru and Novaya Gazeta journalists to disclose their sources.
Russia is ranked 153rd out of 175 countries in the 2009 RSF press freedom index.
