- Date
- 06/08/1997
- First
- Valery
- Surname
- KRIVOSHEYEV
- Sex/Age
- M, 34
- Incident
- homicide
- Motive
- nJ
- Place
- street
- Job
- journalist
- Medium
- Federal District Plus
- CENTRAL
- Street, Town, Region
- Lipetsk
- Freelance
- no
- Local/National
- national, Komsomolskaya pravda
- Other Ties
- Cause of Death
- murder, beaten
- Legal Qualification
- Impunity
- amnesty, investigation halted
Valery Krivosheyev, Komsomolskaya pravda correspondent for the Kursk, Lipetsk and Oryol Regions, died in Lipetsk on 5 September 1997. On Saturday evening, 5 September, he told colleagues he was going to an important meeting linked to material he was preparing to publish. On the morning of 6 September his body was found near the Orbita café. Examination showed that he had died around 11 pm.
The Lipetsk Region police department said they considered Krivosheyev’s killing an everyday crime. The journalist’s colleagues saw a connection to his professional activities since he wrote a great deal about crime and criminals and was investigating conflicts at the Lipetsk combined feed combine and during the privatisation of the Novolipetsk metallurgical works. Komsomolskaya pravda said it would carry out its own investigation. Forensic examination suggested that Krivosheyev’s death was the result of a massive brain haemorrhage. This was caused, in the experts’ view, by a “congenital pathology of blood vessels in the brain”, a conclusion reached in two further post-mortems, including an examination by the national forensic centre in Moscow.
A few days after Krivosheyev’s death a Lipetsk businessman confessed to investigators that he had quarrelled with the journalist at the café and struck him what proved a fatal blow. No charges followed, even under Article 115 (Intentional infliction of light injury) and the suspect was released under an amnesty declared by the Duma in late 1997. On 1 June 1998 the Lipetsk city prosecutor’s office halted the preliminary investigation into the case. Krivosheyev was a well-known journalist locally and was one of the organisers of a popular Lipetsk newspaper De facto before joining Komsomolskaya pravda in 1995.