Journalist says police faked death for sting
He apologizes to wife, friends for faux fatality
Arkady Babchenko, an anti-Kremlin journalist reported shot and killed in Kiev, Ukraine, showed up alive Wednesday at a news conference to explain police faked his death to catch the man who ordered a hit on him.
To applause and gasps, Babchenko took the floor at the news conference in the Ukrainian capital and apologized to the friends and family — including his wife — who had mourned for him and were unaware of the plan.
His wife found him outside their apartment entrance Tuesday evening “bleeding” from what she thought were gunshot wounds to his back. As part of the ruse, police said he died in an ambulance en route to the hospital.
“I want to say sorry for what you felt. I had to bury my friends and colleagues many times,” Babchenko said at the offices of the Ukrainian Security Service, the Kyiv Post reported.
According to the Ukrainian Security Service, Russian special services allegedly ordered Babchenko killed and paid an unnamed Ukrainian citizen $40,000 to organize the killing. The Ukrainian agency said he, in turn, paid a potential gunman $30,000 to carry out the hit, the newspaper reported.
When the Ukrainian agency learned of the plot, it recruited the gunman to work as a double agent to fake the shooting and arrest the organizer, who was apprehended.
The security service said, according to the Post, that Babchenko’s death was intended to be the first of about 30 planned killings of Russian citizens in Ukraine allegedly ordered by Russian special services.
Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, said the scheme had been in the works for a month. National Police spokesman Yaroslav Trakalo had told reporters the “killer” had been waiting for Babchenko in the stairwell. A police composite even described him as a tall man in his 40s with a gray beard.
Babchenko, 41, served in the Russian army during two wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and hosts a news program on Ukraine’s ATR channel. Babchenko assailed Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, its support for separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine and the Russian campaign in Syria. Some Russian lawmakers have called for stripping Babchenko of his citizenship.