Published 14:20 IST, October 3rd 2020
'Blame Russian Federation': Journalist dies after setting herself on fire
A Russian journalist died after setting herself on fire in front of an interior ministry office following a police raid in a probe targeting an opposition group
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A Russian journalist died after setting herself on fire in front of an interior ministry office following a police raid related to a probe targeting an opposition group. Irina Slavina, the editor of an independent Russian news portal, had urged people on social media to blame the Russian government for her death, without elaborating the cause.
"I ask you to blame the Russian Federation for my death,” she wrote on her Facebook page.
A day before her death, Slavina wrote on Facebook that 12 people including police officers and investigators searched her apartment and she was not allowed to call her lawyer. The investigators were allegedly looking for “brochures, leaflets, accounts” from the Open Russia opposition group, which is financed by the Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Opposition slams Kremlin
Slavina said that she didn’t have any of those documents they were looking for, accusing the investigators of taking away whatever they found, including her laptop, her daughter's laptop, computer, and her husband’s mobile phone. In another Facebook post, she said that they came for her because of her work, adding that “everything was not in vain.” Russian opposition leaders extended their support to the journalist, saying Slavina had been under pressure from the authorities.
“Over the past years security officials have subjected her to endless persecution because of her opposition,” Russian politician Dmitry Gudkov wrote on Instagram.
“What a nightmare,” Ilya Yashin, another Kremlin critic, wrote on Twitter. “All of these cases of police amusing themselves, these shows of men in masks – these are not games. The government is truly breaking people psychologically.”
In 2006, investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a strong critic of human rights abuses in Chechnya, was killed in Moscow and another critic Alexander Litvinenko died in London after being poisoned with a radioactive substance. An inquiry by UK authorities later found out that Litvinenko was killed by Russian spies.
14:21 IST, October 3rd 2020