If you’re an insurance company, you might want to reconsider insuring anyone who is a foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The (seeming) hits keep on coming:
A senior Russian journalist who embarrassed the country’s powerful military establishment with a series of damaging stories has been found dead outside his flat in mysterious circumstances.
The body of Ivan Safronov, the 51-year-old defence correspondent for Russia’s progressive Kommersant newspaper, was discovered on Friday. He apparently fell from a fifth-floor window.
It’s kind of interesting how critics of Putin’s government are suddenly and in increasing numbers finding their life spans drastically reduced via mysterious poisonings, falling from windows etc. MORE:
Although prosecutors say they suspect Mr Safranov committed suicide, colleagues of the dead journalist today insisted that he had no reason to kill himself. He is also the latest in a long line of Russian journalists to have died in unexplained circumstances, they added.
And — just coincidentally, to be sure — he just happened to be a hard-hitting investigative reporter:
Several newspapers pointed suspiciously to Safranov’s track record of breaking exclusive stories about Russia’s nuclear programme. Last December, he revealed that Russia’s experimental Bulava intercontinental ballistic missile – hailed by president Vladimir Putin as the basis for Russia’s future nuclear might – did not actually work.
It had failed to launch for the third consecutive time, he wrote. His story infuriated Russian military commanders, who continue to deny problems with the missile. They launched an internal investigation and threatened Mr Safranov with legal action.
“For some reason, it is those journalists who are disliked by the authorities who die in this country,” the mass-selling daily, Moskovsky Komsomolets, observed today. “Ivan Safronov was one of those. He knew a lot about the real situation in the army and the defence industries and he reported it.”
It is kind of curious, isn’t it? Just as the circumstances surrounding his death raise an eyebrow (or two):
Witnesses to his death said they heard what sounded like a “large snowfall”. When they looked out from a nearby balcony, they saw Mr Safronov lying sprawled on the pavement. He had just returned to his Moscow apartment block from a shopping trip and several oranges lay scattered on the stairwell.
Those details sure make it sound as if it was a suicide, don’t they?
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.