Another Russian journalist found dead
A journalist with state-run Russian television has been found dead in a Moscow apartment with a belt around his neck and numerous stab wounds.
The victim, Channel One journalist Ilyas Shurpayev, comes from the southern province of Dagestan, which is plagued by clan struggle and criminal violence.
Later yesterday, unidentified gunmen also shot and killed the head of Dagestan’s provincial state-controlled TV station, and police were looking at a possible link between the two murders.
There is no evidence so far that Mr Shurpayev’s killing was connected to his work, and little chance that his reports on the state station, which is controlled by the Kremlin, would have angered authorities.
Russia has increasingly been seen as unsafe for journalists. In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, who wrote about Russian atrocities in Chechnya, was shot dead in a killing that has never been solved.
Firefighters found Mr Shurpayev’s body in his rented studio apartment yesterday after a fire apparently set after the attack, Channel One spokeswoman Larisa Krymova said.
The Investigative Committee, the branch of the prosecutor’s office that announced the murder investigation, said nothing about a possible motive for Shurpayev’s killing. Ms Krymova also declined comment on that aspect of the case.
State-run Vesti-24 television cited a concierge in Shurpayev’s building as saying he had called down from his apartment to ask her to let in two young men. The men apparently looked like natives of North Caucasus, the report said.
Mr Shurpayev, 32, has worked in Russia’s violence-ridden North Caucasus, which includes Dagestan and war-scarred Chechnya.
Hours before his death, he wrote in his blog that the owners of a newspaper in Dagestan banned a column he wrote from appearing in the paper and instructed its staffers not to mention his name in publications.
“Now I am a dissident!” was the headline of the last entry in his Web journal.
“The funny thing is that this paper has not published anything but my travel reports,” he said. “I have not participated in the political life (in Dagestan).”
It was not immediately clear whether there was a connection between his writing and his death.
“We are shocked and saddened by Shurpayev’s murder,” Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based media freedom watchdog, said in a statement.
“We urge the authorities to carry out a thorough investigation and to consider all hypotheses, including the possibility that it was linked to his work as a journalist, which is such a risky profession in Russia.”
This evening, unidentified gunmen also killed Gadzhi Abashilov, chief of Dagestan’s state-controlled regional television company, riddling his car with bullet in the provincial capital, Makhachkala. The regional branch of Russia’s Interior Ministry said the murders of Shurpayev and Abashilov could be linked but would not comment on possible motives.
