The police have established the identity of two suspects in the murder of television Channel One reporter Ilyas Shurpayev, a spokesman for the Moscow investigation department of the Investigation Committee at the Russian Prosecutor’s Office told Itar-Tass on Thursday. “Two people who may be involved in the murder of Shurpayev have been identified by the present moment,” he said. No other...
Questioning of new witness in the Serbian journalist Slavko Ćuruvija's murder case has resumed, according to Tanjug news agency. In a supplement to the application for an investigation to be carried out, the Special Prosecution recently proposed questioning a further 10 to 15 new witness, and as well for a medical-ballistic forensic examination to be performed. The names of the witness, as well as...
Security police Thursday raided Belarussian broadcasters' offices and detained at least two reporters at their homes, Reuters has reported. The raids were launched two days after police broke up a rally by opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko and dozens of activists were fined or handed short jail terms. Zhanna Litvina, head of Belarus's Journalists' Association, told Reuters that the KGB...
The search for a missing millionaire executive of a UK newspaper has entered its second week after Latvian police failed to make any headway on his disappearance last week, says a report in the Independent. Leonid Rozhetskin, the Russian-born backer of the business free sheet City AM, has not been seen since last weekend when he vanished from his holiday home in Latvia. The businessman, who co...
Authorities in in the Russian republic of Ingushetia want to see the back of a private television channel that has shown critical reports from the region. In an open letter to the Russian parliament, the prosecutor-general, the FSB security service and the interior ministry, delegates of the region’s Popular Assembly demanded that Moscow-based REN-TV stop broadcasting in the Republic, according to...
Two gendarmes have testified in court that they told their superiors about plans to kill journalist Hrant Dink six months before his murder on January 19, 2007, but their superiors did nothing and later threatened them with reprisals if they mentioned the information. The gendarmes from the northeastern city of Trabzon, Okan Simsek and Veysel Sahin, who are on trial for failing to react after...
The leader of a small Turkish nationalist party and the editor of a left-leaning newspaper have been detained in a probe into a shadowy ultra-nationalist gang, Reuters reported quoting Turkish media on Friday. Thirty-nine people have already been charged in the police investigation into the far-right group, known as Ergenekon, over allegations that it sought to engineer a coup against the country...
Two journalists who covered the volatile North Caucasus have been murdered in Russia in the last 24 hours, the first such killings in nearly a year. The motives are still unclear. Firefighters found the body of Ilyas Shurpayev, a correspondent for Russian state television’s Channel One, in his Moscow apartment early Friday morning. He had been strangled and stabbed. The perpetrators had apparently...
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is dropping a lawsuit against French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur for reporting that he sent a text message to ex-wife Cecilia offering to call off his marriage, a statement by his new wife Carla Bruni said today. Sarkozy last month had lodged the complaint against Le Nouvel Observateur for reporting he had sent a SMS to Cecilia eight days before his marriage to ex...
A Ukrainian court has convicted three former police officers of killing an investigative journalist nearly eight years ago. The verdict Saturday in Ukranian capital Kiev ended a high-profile trial—but one the family of the journalist, Heorhiy Gongadze, says has failed to bring the masterminds to justice, the Associated Press (AP) reported. Mykola Protasov was sentenced to 13 years in jail. Valeriy...
