Date

08/01/2006  

First

Vagif  

Surname

KOCHETKOV  

Sex/Age

M, 31  

Incident

homicide  

Motive

nJ  

Place

near home  

Job

journalist  

Medium

print  

Federal District Plus

CENTRAL  

Street, Town, Region

Tula  

Freelance

yes  

Local/National

local, Trud  

Other Ties

 

Cause of Death

murder, beaten  

Legal Qualification

111.4 (manslaughter) n& 162 (robbery with violence)  

Impunity

trial, acquittal, 8 April 2008  

[Updated 16 October 2010]

The Investigative Committee, which now answers directly to the President (until recently it answered to the Prosecutor General), has given assurances to a visiting delegation from the CPJ that it will give serious consideration to 19 deaths that the CPJ believes to have been murders linked to the professional activities of the deceased journalist. One name on this list is that of Vagif Kochetkov.

(See agency and Russian media reports on CPJ press conference)



MAIN ENTRY

Journalist Vagif Kochetkov was attacked late at night on 27 December 2005 not far from the flat he shared with parents in Tula. He did not see his attacker. When found by neighbours his mobile phone and bag were missing. After a day he was taken to hospital where he died on 8 January 2006.

Traced through the stolen phone, a convincing suspect was soon found and in April 2006 was put on trial charged with manslaughter and robbery with violence. The suggestion that the attack had anything to do with Kochetkov's work as a journalist was discounted by most of his colleagues.

In April 2008, after the investigation had been repeated by the prosecutor's office, the trial ended in acquittal.

Vagif Kochetkov was born in Baku and moved with his family to Tula in the late 1980s. He first worked for the local TV channel and then wrote for newspapers in Tula, particularly Tulsky molodoi kommunar, and for a succession of national papers, such as Rossiskie vesti and Novye izvestia. Four months before his death he became Trud's correspondent for the Tula, Ryazan and Kaluga Regions.


PARTIAL JUSTICE (June 2009)

Vagif Kochetkov was attacked in Tula late on Tuesday night, 27 December 2005. He was found by neighbours around 2 am on Wednesday morning and they took him back to the flat he shared with his parents. It was not until 30 December that he was admitted to hospital after being diagnosed with a serious head injury. On 5 January 2006 Kochetkov was moved to intensive care and operated on, but he died three days later.

Journalists writing for other newspapers, and media monitors, then and since have raised suspicions that Kochetkov’s investigative work and publications as a journalist could account for the attack. On 23 November 2006 an article by Kochetkov about abuses in provision of free medicine to the needy was posthumously published by a Moscow weekly (Argumenty nedeli). It was prefaced by the suggestion that the “well known Russian journalist Vagif Kochetkov” might have been killed for investigating the subject. In February 2007 his name, together with that of Anna Politkovskaya, was enshrined in the list of those journalists who had died for their work in the News Museum in Washington.

From the outset, however, there were doubts about the motive behind the attack which resembled so much of the street crime afflicting Russia. Police in Tula told local journalists in January 2006 that they had recorded no less than fifty such attacks in the first few days of the New Year.

BACKGROUND

Vagif Kochetkov had worked as a journalist since 1993 when he joined the local radio station in Tula, a city of half a million inhabitants, 135 kms south of Moscow. He wrote for the evening newspaper, took an interest in local politics and at his death remained political commentator for the Tulsky Molodoi kommunar, the twice-weekly regional newspaper where his friend Alexander Yermakov was deputy chief editor. At the same time Kochetkov developed ties with a number of national periodicals.

He worked as local correspondent for the liberal daily Novye izvestia and the Rossiiskie vesti weekly and it seems he also occasionally contributed to the Soviet-era daily Trud, with its national circulation of 220,000. It was only in September 2005, however, that Kochetkov became Trud’s regular correspondent for the neighbouring Ryazan and Kaluga Regions, as well as the Tula Region itself.

For the first few days after the attack Kochetkov was conscious and talked to his colleagues Alexander Yermakov and Yelena Shulepova, local correspondent of the National News Agency. He did not see who had attacked him and had no memory of what had happened. When he was released from hospital, the 31-year-old said, he would “get to the bottom of it”.

INTERPRETATIONS

When Kochetkov was found he no longer had his mobile phone or his bag. This supported the view that the attack was part of a robbery but could also lend credence to his father’s account that his son had been going to meet someone about something he was investigating and that papers he carried with him had vanished.

Working for a national newspaper Kochetkov’s death received wide publicity but Trud could say relatively little about him. This was not true of Yermakov and Shulepova. Independently of one another, they read all Kochetkov’s publications of the last 6-12 months and both concluded that there was nothing there which would explain or justify such an attack. Even the posthumous article about abuse in the provision of medicine for the needy contained nothing that had not appeared before. Claims elsewhere in the Russian media that Kochetkov was attacked because of his work can be traced back either to statements by his father (who showed the CJES expert Sergei Plotnikov the posthumous 23 November article) or to authors who were not directly familiar with Kochetkov’s publications.

Initially the police qualified the incident as robbery (Article 161), an offence that under the Criminal Procedural Code is investigated and sent to court by the police themselves. After Kochetkov’s death a criminal case was opened under Article 111.4 (manslaughter) in which investigators from the local prosecutor’s office took control and supervised police work. Within a very short period of time the mobile phone was traced to Jan Stakhanov, a Tula resident with previous criminal convictions, and within two weeks he was arrested. On 3 April 2006 Stakhanov was put on trial at the Proletarsky district court in Tula, charged with manslaughter and robbery with violence.

INVESTIGATION AND TRIAL

The investigation was rapidly conducted. The subsequent trial would continue, off and on, until April 2008 when Stakhanov was acquitted.

The head of the Tula Region criminal investigation department said that neither police sources of information nor verifiable suggestions by Kochetkov’s colleagues gave support to the idea he had been attack because of his work as a journalist. Neither did the prosecutor’s office consider this possibility. If Yelena Shulepova also doubted that there was any link between the attack on her colleague and his work, she was sceptical about the correct identification of the attacker.

Vagif Kochetkov wrote for national as well as local newspapers and his killing was the first such death in the Tula Region – in fact, the first death of a journalist or editor in any of the surrounding regions (apart from the Moscow Region) since the late 1990s. There was, therefore, pressure on the local law enforcement agencies to produce results.

The head of the Tula Region police force Ivan Rozhkov had known Kochetkov personally and intervened to support the investigation. The consequences were ambiguous. To Shulepova, who had written about crime and the law, it seemed that first the police and then the prosecutor’s office acted with undue haste. They did not make a thorough job of the investigation and picked the first plausible suspect. She maintained this view of the investigation. Later, however, she became convinced that Stakhanov was the perpetrator since he revealed something that only the person who had searched Kochetkov’s bag after taking it could know: when the bag was found, during the trial, it confirmed what Stakhanov had said in his first depositions, that there was a journalist’s card in a blue cover. Trud had recently changed its staff identity card and few apart from its journalists knew that.

Kochetkov’s father, Yury Baikov, chose himself to represent the injured party at the trial. He and his wife continued to believe that their son was attacked for his work as a journalist. Today they are almost alone in that belief. The failings of the investigators, Baikov insisted, were the result of deliberate external pressure and not due to haste or a lack of professionalism. One of the prosecutors subsequently commented on the “odd aspects” and inconsistencies of the police investigation. Former prosecutor Mikhail Milman, now a CJES expert, said that the case was ill-prepared and that he would not have sent it to court in that condition. The judge had little alternative, in Milman’s view, but to acquit.

In January 2007 the case was returned to the prosecutor’s office for further investigation. A new charge sheet was confirmed on 28 April 2007 and the trial resumed. A hearing was held one day a week until 8 April 2008 when Jan Stakhanov was acquitted of all charges.

See case study in Partial Justice (June 2009), pp 15-17.



“PROTEK: THE BENEFACTOR FORCED UPON US”

(Originally published in "Molodoi Kommunar" on 17 June 2005;
translated for CPJ by Ekaterina Lysova)

Doctors advise that sick, low-income people stock up on healing herbs for self-medication. Well, the times are good for this. To rely on the state, which is supposed to provide free medications, is not recommended to Tula residents. Even the regional administration does not know what to do with the confusing Law No. 122 [on medical coverage] and the commercial interests that accompany it.

“A PROTECTION RACKET” FOR A CLOSED COMPANY

There is only one “benefactor” on our market, which has been authorized to provide medication to those citizens who have the right to get state social benefits: the closed joint-stock company Protek Center for Implementation.

The Moscow-based Protek did not appear in the Tula region out of thin air. The government of the Russian Federation forced it upon us. There have been rumors floating about in the corridors of the Tula White House [the government building] about a special relationship between this company and Russian Health Minister Mikhail Zurabov. This seems to be the reason no one in the previous [Tula] regional administration would stand up for the interests of local residents dependent on state medical benefits. How come the governments of the Moscow, St. Petersburg, or Sverdlovsk regions could do it and Tula’s could not? In the Tula region, Protek has de facto monopolized the medical benefits’ market: In the past five months, Protek sales people have dictated their conditions, forcing local pharmacies and hospitals to accept their one-sided contracts. […]

COMPLETE LOSSES

Here are the opinions of those directly dealing with the implementation of Law No. 122 on the ground. Among them are the doctors and heads of the pharmacies who “lucked out” to be Protek partners. “We have borne total losses,” says E. Koshar, head of the Bogoroditsk central district pharmacy. “The contract forced upon us by Protek does not benefit us. We provided [Protek] with offices as well as with our specialists who have done additional work without being paid. Protek hasn’t even paid for what we have spent on them from our own budget.”

Here I need to clarify. As a matter of fact, according to Law No. 122, the prescriptions for low-income patients are issued in a new way and in compliance with the government-approved list of medications. This list contains 2,000 items and each item has its own code. A company chosen by the government theoretically should itself manage the process of prescribing medicines, providing services in the pharmacy, and paying the Medical Insurance Fund. But in Tula, all this is being done by the personnel of local hospitals and pharmacies. For free. And this is despite the fact that Protek has enough resources to do the work on its own. “Workers are quitting their jobs,” complains L. Kashirina, the director of the state-owned company Shchekinskaya. “Our pharmacy bears losses. Protek’s leadership is confusing everybody. Until recently, we hoped for good relations with this company, but their contract hurts us. These socalled partners don’t even want to hear us out.”
…
(Reprinted with permission of "Molodoi Kommunar", Tula)

From THE ANATOMY OF INJUSTICE. UNSOLVED KILLINGS OF JOURNALISTS IN RUSSIA
(Committee to Protect Journalists, New York, September 2009): Appendix 1 – Excerpts from the work of journalists slain in Russia since 2000
http://cpj.org/reports/CPJ.Anatomy%20of%20Injustice.pdf