Journo in fake kill plot

TO gasps, whoops and applause of stunned colleagues, Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko walked into a news conference yesterday, a day after Ukrainian police said he had been assassinated.

Authorities said his death had been staged to foil a plot on his life by Moscow’s security services and one arrest had been made.

Russia denounced the faked killing as an outlandish attempt at defamation.

Even Babchenko’s wife was unaware of the deception, and the 41-year-old Kremlin critic, who fled to Ukraine 15 months ago, apologised “for the hell she had to go through in the past two days. There was no choice there, either.”

Neither Babchenko nor Ukrainian Security Service chief Vasyl Gritsak gave details of the sting or how they made his wife believe he was dead.

A day earlier, Kiev police chief Andriy Krishchenko announced Babchenko’s death, saying the journalist’s wife found him bleeding at their Kiev apartment building but that he died en route to the hospital.

Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the interior minister, said an assailant had waited on a staircase in the building and shot Babchenko in the back as he was going to buy bread.

Yesterday, Mr Gritsak announced the murder had been solved. When Babchenko walked into the room, reporters gasped, then clapped.

“I’m still alive,” an uneasylooking Babchenko said with a straight face, before apologising for the deception.

“I know that sickening feeling when you bury a colleague,” he said.

He said Ukraine’s law enforcement had been aware of a contract on his head for two months and he was approached by the Ukrainian Security Service a month ago.

“The important thing is my life has been saved and other, bigger terrorist attacks have been thwarted,” he said.