Posted on December 1, 2009 - by Venik
Colleagues urge investigation into Russian journalist’s death
Olga Kotovskaya, a prominent journalist in Kaliningrad, fell from 14th-storey window a day after winning major legal case
Friends and colleagues today called for an investigation into the death of a Russian regional TV journalist who plunged from the 14th storey of a building a day after winning a major legal case.
Olga Kotovskaya, a prominent journalist in the western enclave of Kaliningrad, died on 16 November.
Officials initially claimed her death was suicide, but last week opened a criminal investigation into claims that she had been murdered.
The case has attracted little attention from Russia’s predominantly Kremlin-controlled media, with news of Kotovskaya’s suspicious death only reaching international human rights groups earlier this week.
She fell from a window a day after winning a long-running court battle to regain control of her successful Kaskad regional TV channel.
Founded in the early 90s, the channel had a reputation for objective news reporting, live broadcasts, and studio guests who were sometimes critical of regional leaders.
In 2004, a group of local bureaucrats, led by Kaliningrad’s former deputy governor Vladimir Pirogov, seized control of the channel, which immediately stopped criticising the enclave’s administration.
A day before Kotovskaya’s death, a court ruled that her signature on a document giving her company to its new owners had been forged.
“I have no doubt at all that this was a political killing,” Solomon Ginzburg, a deputy in Kaliningrad’s regional parliament told the Guardian.
“It was murder. Olga was a strong, feisty woman. A year before her death, she came to me and said that a high-ranking official had urged her to drop her legal case.”
Ginzburg said Kotovskaya was not an opposition activist but was opposed to censorship and had disliked it in the Soviet period.
“I know a lot of journalists at Kaskad,” he said. “They are pretty honest about what goes on. They talk openly about the fact they now have to paint the regional administration in rosy colours.
“The situation is worse than in the final years of the Soviet Union.’
The Kaliningrad branch of Russia’s Union of Journalists ridiculed the “comfortable” theory that Kotovskaya killed herself.
It urged law enforcement agencies to investigate, adding that the 50-year-old journalist – who had two grown-up children, Mikhail and Ksenia – had no reason to kill herself. Kotovoskya had built up a thriving media business, including two independent TV stations, a daily newspaper, two radio stations and a PR agency.
Her husband, Igor Rostov, who formerly co-owned her company, has hired a private detective to try and identify her killers.
“She was murdered,” he told the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper. “If I am found dead on the rails, do not believe that I committed suicide.”
According to the New York-based Committee to Project Journalists, Russia is the third most dangerous place in the world to be a reporter after Iraq and Algeria.
Since 2000, 17 journalists have been murdered because of their work or have died under suspicious circumstances. The killers been convicted in only one case, and the masterminds remain unpunished in every instance.
So far, nobody has been held responsible for the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist and Kremlin critic who was gunned down outside her Moscow flat in October 2006.
Four colleagues from her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, have also been murdered, including Anastasia Baburova, a young journalist who was shot dead in January together with the paper’s lawyer, Stanislav Markelov.
According to Mikhail Melnikov, from Moscow’s Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations, around 40 to 50 attacks on journalists take place in Russia every year.
“The situation is bad, of course. But it’s stable,” he said. “The picture differs. Some Russian regions are alright, but in others it’s the middle ages.”
Today, Marianna Andryushina, the press secretary for the Investigations Committee of the prosecutor’s office in Kalinigrad, said investigators were considering several theories in connection with Kotovskaya’s death.
“This includes the possibility that she was forced to commit suicide,” she said.
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