- Title: RUSSIA: A second journalist sustains head injuries in beating
- Date: 10th November 2010
- Summary: ANATOLY ADAMCHUK'S PORTRAIT ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE NEWSPAPER
- Embargoed: 25th November 2010 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Russian Federation
- Country: Russia
- Topics: Crime / Law Enforcement
- Reuters ID: LVA9R420LT3AZ01NMGDSFRZG9HQH
- Story Text: A newspaper journalist was severely beaten near Moscow on Monday night (November 8), in the second such attack in Russia in less than a week.
Anatoly Adamchuk, who works for a regional paper, was assaulted by two men outside the office of the weekly Zhukovskie Vesti newspaper, located southeast of Moscow.
He suffered a concussion and other minor injuries and was admitted to the hospital the day after.
Adamchuk said he didn't see the faces of the attackers, but he heard them cry out the name of our publication several times.
The journalist had recently written about the detention of several youths aged between 11 and 14 last week by local police for protesting against the town authorities' highway construction plans.
Adamchuk said the attack was could be related to his recent publications.
"I think the people who are trying to escalate the situation around the forest and the new road and to destabilise the social situation in the town of Zhukovsky are responsible for this. I will not make suggestions about who exactly is responsible, because I do not want to blame anyone, but there are forces who might gain from such a destabilisation. I think - - touch wood -- that this will be the last action of such kind, but I can assume there will be more extremist actions," he said.
His colleagues also said they believed the attack was linked to his reporting on plans to log a nearby forest to build a controversial highway.
"We have discussed this story with our journalists, and we came to a conclusion that this was not only a blow to Adamchuk, this was a blow to the newspaper. This was a warning. They warned us that we should not touch this topic," said Natalia Znamenskaya, the editor-in-chief of Zhukovskie Vesti.
Local authorities say the highway should be built through the forest near Zhukovsky by 2012. There has been a standoff between local residents and authorities for over a year over the construction.
The newspaper said they had already receieved a warning to drop the topic.
"Yesterday we gathered all the journalists and told them that a war had been declared to us. This is absolutely obvious. We should all be very careful from now on. We forbade our staff to walk around town. We will use taxis. We will install security cameras inside the office because we expect provocations," Znamenskaya said.
Zhukovskie Vesti is a small weekly in the town of Zhukovsky with a population of about 100,000 people and 25 km (16 miles) south-east of Moscow.
The attack follows a similar assault on Kommersant's Oleg Kashin, a 30-year-old political correspondent, who was badly beaten in Moscow on Saturday.
The attack left him in coma with broken legs, fingers, a damaged skull and fractured jaws.
Top editors of Russian media gathered for a discussion on Tuesday and and demanded actions from authorities.
"The point is that this was a brash and deliberately open crime in the centre of the city. And I want to tell the new mayor, Sergei Sobyanin -- because the security forces of the city are his responsibility as well -- that it is in his interest to ensure they are more active," editor-in-chief of Echo Moskvi (Echo of Moscow) Radio, Alexey Venediktov, said at the round table.
Rights groups have previously complained the Kremlin has not done enough to tackle violence against journalists. There have been a string of journalists' murders that have made Russia one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a reporter.
The attack on Kashin, classed as attempted murder, prompted President Dmitry Medvedev to instruct the prosecutor general and the interior ministry to "take special control of the investigation."
There have been 19 unsolved murders of journalists in Russia since 2000, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which ranks Russia as eighth among states where reporters are killed regularly and where the crimes remain unsolved. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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