Natalya Alyakina, RUFA and Focus KILLED
Alyakina, a journalist with dual Russian-German citizenship who was working for the German weekly magazine Focus and the radio news service RUFA, was killed by a Russian soldier. She had been given permission by Russian soldiers to cross a Russian army checkpoint leading into the southern city of Budyonnovsk, where she was going to report on a mass hostage-taking by Chechen rebels, but she was shot shortly after passing through the roadblock. She was with her husband, Gisbert Mrozek, who also worked for RUFA and Focus. In September, a prosecutor was assigned to the case, and an investigation was opened. CPJ sent a letter in October to the Russian government requesting information on the progress of the investigation, and conducted a fact-finding mission to Russia in November to report on the unsolved murders of Alyakina and other Russian journalists.
UPDATE (7/16/96): On July 16, Sergei Fedotov, the soldier accused of killing Alyakina, was handed a suspended sentence of two years for "involuntary manslaughter through negligent use of firearms" by a military judge in the southern Russian city of Lermontov in Stravropol Territory. Gisbert Mrozek, Alyakina's widower and an eyewitness to her death, lodged an appeal for a retrial with the Northern Caucases Military Prosecutor. Mrozek, himself a RUFA correspondent, has repeatedly protested to Russian officials about the inept handling of evidence and the refusal to call witnesses whose accounts differ from the official version of events. The soldier claimed in court that he had accidentally triggered a heavy machine gun with his foot as he entered an armored personnel carrier (APC), firing the two shots that killed Alyakina. The prosecutor demanded an acquittal, stating that Fedotov could not have known the safety catch was off and blamed the accident on a design fault in the APC.
© 1996 alyakina@geocities.com
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