Russia’s main opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta on Wednesday said its top journalist had fled the country after the country’s chief investigator threatened to kill him.
The newspaper’s editor Dmitry Muratov said in an open letter that the head of the Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, had threatened its deputy editor Sergei Sokolov over an article criticising a high-profile case. Contacted by AFP Wednesday, Muratov said Sokolov “had been forced to leave the country” and that he could not be reached by telephone.
The Investigative Committee declined to comment when contacted by AFP.
Novaya Gazeta is jointly owned by Alexander Lebedev, who also owns Britain’s Evening Standard and The Independent newspapers, and the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. “You brutally threatened the life of my deputy editor,” Muratov wrote in his open letter to Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin. “You even joked that you would be the one investigating the (murder) case.” The journalist and the investigator allegedly quarrelled on a trip they took together last Monday, Muratov wrote in the letter, published on the newspaper’s website.
