Date

30/03/2009  

First

Sergei  

Surname

PROTAZANOV  

Sex/Age

M, 40  

Incident

not confirmed  

Motive

nJ  

Place

(flat)  

Job

media worker, layout artist  

Medium

print  

Federal District Plus

CENTRAL  

Street, Town, Region

Khimki, Moscow Region  

Freelance

no  

Local/National

local, Grazhdanskoe soglasie  

Other Ties

 

Cause of Death

attacked?  

Legal Qualification

no information  

Impunity

preliminary investigation  

[Corrected, 5 May 2010]

Sergei Protazanov, layout artist with the "Grazhdanskoe soglasie" (Civic concord) newspaper, died on Monday evening, 30 March 2009. Late on Saturday night he was found by neighbours, bruised but conscious, on the stairs of his apartment block in Khimki. He was taken to hospital but given an injection, told all was well, and sent home.

There are conflicting and unresolved versions of what happened to Protazanov. Several hours before his death he rang the paper’s chief editor Anatoly Yurov and told him that he had been given “a severe beating”. Yurov, who himself received ten stab wounds in an attack in February 2008, told the GDF that Protazanov was “preparing the latest issue of 'Grazhdanskoe soglasie' in which opposition candidates were to present their views on the violations that occurred during the recent mayoral election campaign.” His attackers perhaps wanted to intimidate Protazanov, suggests Yurov, so that the issue did not appear or was delayed. At first his relatives were told that Sergei Protazanov had died of poisoning, combining pain-killers with alcohol. Later the version changed and his death was attributed to a haemorrhage.

The uncertainty surrounding Protazanov’s death was part of a continuing series of attacks on the local press. At the time the weekly "Grazhdanskoe soglasie" (print run 50,000) was the last remaining opposition paper in a community which had just gone through a heavily-contested mayoral election, with a strong movement in defence of the local forest against local plans for development and, in particular, the building of a high speed Moscow-Petersburg paid highway. In November 2008 Mikhail Beketov, chief editor of the opposition "Khimkinskaya pravda", was severely beaten and remained in a coma for months. He recovered partially but was permanently disabled; his paper resumed publication in a reduced format. The attacks continue with the shooting of rights activist Anatoly Pchelintsev in July.


AN EVERYDAY CRIME, AFTER ALL?

A week after Sergei Protazanov's death "Novaya gazeta" journalist Yelena Kostyuchenko talked to those involved and concluded (6 April 2009) that he had most likely died as the result of a fight or an accident and his death was not linked to politics. Given the events preceding and subsequent to Protazanov's death it was understandable to suspect the local authorities. His chief editor Yurov, had already been attacked three times, and was warned he might again be attacked.

Protazanov's autopsy results had not been received by the time Kostyuchenko published her full-page account of the results of the investigation. Though she had identified the people involved in what proved a fatal incident it remained uncertain whether the police or prosecutor's office would open a criminal investigation.