RUSSIAN RADIO JOURNALIST STABBED
MOSCOW:
The Russian journalist Tatyana Feldenhauer has been seriously injured after an unidentified attacker stabbed her in the throat.
The incident took place in the editorial offices of the Echo of Moscow radio station after 12 noon local time. Felderhauer is deputy editor in chief of the leading liberal media outlet.
The man, who had broken into the editorial office, was held by colleagues and later arrested.
Ms Felgenhauer is in hospital and receiving treatment, which includes a catheter to bypass the neck wound. According to the editor in chief, Alexei Venediktov, the injuries are not life-threatening.
The Ria Novosti state news agency has reported a source claiming that the assailant may have been motivated by an undisclosed “personal conflict”. A spokesman for the Russian Prosecutor-general’s office, Alexander Kurennoi, said on Facebook the attack was an outrageous act.
Fellow Echo of Moscow journalist Vitaly Ruvinsky posted a picture on Twitter showing a man accused of being the attacker.
Other images shared on social media showed blood splashed across the floor of the editorial offices, a large knife and Russian police officers with a suspect in handcuffs.
Echo of Moscow is owned by the state-run gas giant Gazprom, but it does give air time to journalists and commentators who are fiercely critical of the Kremlin and has been described in the past as “Russia’s last independent radio station”.
One of the station’s regular broadcasters, Yulia Latynina, said earlier this year she had been forced to flee Russia after a series of attacks, including the torching of her car.
The attack on Felgengauer comes one week after Malta journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who reported on politicians in her country’s links to offshore accounts in the Panama Papers leak, was killed with a car bomb.
Galizia had frequently targeted leading officials on her personal blog, with her family successfully demanding that one of them, the prosecutor assigned to investigate her death, recuse herself.
Sources told The Malta Independent that investigators are looking into an international organized crime group as part of the plot to kill the writer with military-grade explosives not found on the island.
The paper reported that a local resident with ties to the group could have “commissioned” the bombing on Galizia, whose investigative work included probing alleged payments from therulingfamilyofazerbaijanto Maltese officials.
“We are looking at a situation now where no journalist feels safe, and the journalists never feel safe again,” Maltese Member of European Parliament Roberta Metsola told the Daily News last week at a vigil in Brussels.
Committee to Protect journalist figures show that since 1992 almost 60 journalists have been killed in Russia, with two killed earlier this year in St. Petersburg and Siberia.