From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 3/15/2007 8:58 AM
New mysterious death in nation of stilled voices
Friends doubt Russian writer killed himself

By Alex Rodriguez
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published March 15, 2007

MOSCOW -- As Anastasia Yerokhina shared a smoke with her friend on the balcony of her eighth-floor apartment, a loud thud drew their gaze to the building next door.

On the pavement lay the broken body of Russian journalist Ivan Safronov. Oranges he had bought at a Moscow market on his way home were scattered on the asphalt. Face down with his jacket and sweater hitched up to his armpits, Safronov slowly moved one of his legs, Yerokhina said, then lay still.
How and why Safronov died is a mystery that has gripped Moscow since the 51-year-old military affairs reporter plunged from a fifth-floor staircase window March 2.

His colleagues remain convinced that he had no reason to commit suicide. They want authorities to pursue another scenario they believe may be more plausible in today's Russia, where Kremlin persecution of journalists has made the country one of the world's most dangerous places for the media.

Safronov had recently investigated a tip that Russia was going to use Belarus as a conduit for the sale of fighter jets to Syria and anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. He told colleagues he would hold off on writing about what he had learned, however, because he had been warned that the story's publication could trigger an international scandal. Was Safronov's death somehow linked to his probes into Russian arms sales?

"I would be stupid to promise to get to the truth about what happened," Ilya Bulavinov, deputy chief editor of the Russian newspaper Kommersant where Safronov worked, wrote in the paper after Safronov's death. "That may or may not be within our power. But we can try. Because Ivan did not leave on his own. He had too good a family for that."



Deadly country for journalists

Russia is the world's second-deadliest country for journalists, eclipsed only by Iraq, according to the Brussels-based International News Safety Institute. In the past decade, 88 journalists have been killed in Russia, the institute says. If the investigation into Safronov's death shows he was murdered, he would become the 14th journalist slain in Russia since President Vladimir Putin took office seven years ago.

Safronov's death comes at a time when Russia is building a reputation internationally as a place where critics of the state are routinely silenced, sometimes violently.

Last fall, Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-Russian spy living in exile in London and a Kremlin critic, was poisoned with polonium-210, a rare radioactive substance. Before he died, Litvinenko blamed Putin for the poisoning, a charge the Kremlin has vehemently denied.

Paul Joyal, an American friend of Litvinenko and a Russian intelligence expert, survived being shot in the groin outside his home in Maryland on March 3. Though robbery is being investigated as a motive, the attackers did not take his wallet or briefcase. Days before the shooting, Joyal appeared on "Dateline NBC" and said the Kremlin was responsible for Litvinenko's death.

No hard evidence exists that Safronov was murdered. But colleagues worry that authorities will treat his case with the same lack of diligence they have shown in virtually every other investigation of a journalist's death.

Though it received worldwide attention, the murder of Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya remains unsolved five months after a gunman shot her point-blank in the lobby of her apartment building. Regarded as one of Putin's harshest critics, Politkovskaya wrote extensively about atrocities committed by Russian soldiers and pro-Moscow Chechen forces fighting separatists in Chechnya.

"The overwhelming majority of such murders are not investigated at all. Murder has become the most efficient way to shut the mouths of journalists, and to bury the topics they were looking into," said Igor Yakovenko, director of the Russian Union of Journalists.

Safronov's specialty was military affairs. His pieces exposed everything from submarine missile launch failures to Russian arms sales to "rogue" states. The stories frequently caught the attention of the Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the KGB, which called Safronov on numerous occasions to find out whether he was relying on classified information for his reporting, Bulavinov said.

Each time, Safronov provided intelligence agents with ample proof that he had obtained the information through the Internet and other public sources.

"It became a routine," Bulavinov said. "He was never threatened while he was there and he wasn't even angry with them for questioning him."

Shortly before his death, Safronov came across a tip that that Russia was planning to use Belarus to mask the sale of Sukhoi-30 fighter jets to Syria and S-300V anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. According to the information Safronov had, the sales would be channeled through Belarus so Russia could avoid Western criticism that it was selling arms to pariah states, Bulavinov said.

While attending an arms exhibition in the United Arab Emirates in February, Safronov called his Kommersant editors and said he had confirmed the story. However, when he returned to Moscow 10 days later, he told colleagues that he would not write the article because he had received warnings about pursuing the story, Bulavinov said. Safronov did not say who threatened him.



Called in sick on day of death

On the day he died, Safronov called in sick and went to a Moscow clinic to receive treatment for an ulcer. On his way home, he bought a bag of oranges, then took the trolley to his five-story apartment building at 9 Nizhegorodskaya Street.

Yerokhina said she and her friend heard no sounds of a struggle before Safronov fell and saw no one leave the building immediately afterward. Neighbors interviewed by Kommersant reporters also said they heard nothing unusual before Safronov's fall. After seeing him struggle to move a leg, Yerokhina called the local ambulance service.

"I told them, `He's alive. I saw blood, I saw him moving,'" Yerokhina said. "They said, `What's the sense of going out there. Maybe he's just a drunkard. Call in 10 minutes.' "

An ambulance came 15 minutes after her second call.

Suicide is an unlikely cause of death, Bulavinov and Safronov's colleagues say. A former colonel in the Russian military, Safronov had a secure job at Kommersant and a stable family life with his wife and children, Bulavinov said.

"Everyone who knows him says he had no motives to kill himself," Bulavinov said.

In its March 6 edition, Kommersant quoted Moscow prosecutors as saying "data were uncovered indicating that the death of Safronov may have been the result of incitement to suicide." City prosecutors have not elaborated on what they meant and they would not respond to a request for an interview.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703150147mar15,1,5460132.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true