The Russian journalist Mikhail Beketov knew the risks he was taking. In a series of articles Beketov had campaigned against the local administration in the Moscow suburb of Khimki. He had received numerous threats. His car had been set on fire. This summer he returned home to discover his dog lying dead on his doorstep. Beketov continued to publish his newspaper, Khimkinskaya Pravda, which regularly lambasted local officials for corruption and abuse. Finally, it seems, the administration had had enough. On November 11 a gang lay in wait outside his home. When he returned, they savagely attacked him with clubs, breaking his fingers and skull, and leaving him for dead.
Beketov lay unconscious in his garden for almost two days. Eventually a neighbour called the police. She had spotted his leg. The police appeared unbothered by the assault and — assuming he was dead — flung a blanket over Beketov’s face. At this point the journalist’s arm twitched. “Mikhail is floating between life and death,” his friend Ludmilla Fedotova said last week. Beketov is in a coma. Doctors have amputated his right leg. They may also have to remove his frostbitten fingers. “He wasn’t afraid of anybody,” Fedotova said.
Beketov’s fate is a graphic illustration of the dangers of working as a journalist in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. His story is depressingly typical: according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Russia is now the third most dangerous place in the world to work as a reporter, after Iraq and Algeria. Since 1992 49 journalists have been murdered in Russia. Last week three men went on trial accused of involvement in the killing of Anna Politkovskaya — the campaigning journalist and fearless Kremlin opponent shot dead in October 2006 outside her Moscow flat. More
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