- Date
- 02/03/2007
- First
- Ivan
- Surname
- SAFRONOV
- Sex/Age
- M, 51
- Incident
- not confirmed
- Motive
- ?J
- Place
- flat
- Job
- journalist
- Medium
- Federal District Plus
- Moscow
- Street, Town, Region
- Nizhegorodskaya St, Moscow
- Freelance
- no
- Local/National
- national, Kommersant
- Other Ties
- colonel in the reserves
- Cause of Death
- fall from height?
- Legal Qualification
- 110 (incitement to suicide)
- Impunity
- investigation
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 Ivan Safronov.
(See agency and Russian media reports on CPJ press conference)
MAIN ENTRY
Ivan Safronov, a military commentator with Kommersant daily newspaper, died in unclear circumstances on 2 March 2007. According to relatives and loved ones he had no enemies or any major problems at home or at work. He died, apparently, after falling out of the window of his Moscow apartment.
Investigators believe Safronov committed suicide. They found that the journalist was not subjected to violence before his death: his fatal injuries were caused by the fall. It cannot be excluded, say the investigators, that the journalist might have been drugged before his death. A forensic test has been scheduled to check this suggestion.
Safronov’s colleagues say he had information on plans to supply Syria and Iran with weapons via Belarus. He was afraid he would be accused of disclosing a State Secret, he told them. There is an alternative interpretation - the journalist may have been the victim of a killing disguised as a suicide.
At least seven people who talked to Safronov the day before his death, and on the day he died, said he "did not sound himself", was "sleepy" and "depressed". All his friends had noticed significant changes in his mood after a recent trip to the United Arab Emirates. Before leaving for the UAE, he told colleagues from Kommersant that he intended to follow up information on the possible supply of Russian weapons to the Middle East. He said he had information on the supply of weapons to Syria.
CJES, 10 (2007)
“THE BULAVA MISSILE FAILED”
By Ivan Safronov and Elina Bilevskaya
(Originally published in Kommersant on 26 December 2006;
translated for CPJ by Ekaterina Lysova)
Kommersant has learned that the test of the modern intercontinental ballistic missile Bulava, which was launched on Sunday from the Dmitry Donskoi nuclear submarine, was unsuccessful. This is Bulava’s third consecutive crash. The problems associated with launching Bulava cast doubts on future plans to supply the nuclear navy with this kind of missile. Bulava was expected to become the main striking force of the Russian navy’s strategic nuclear forces in the next decade.
According to Kommersant’s sources, at the end of last week, the Dmitry Donskoi submarine went to sea in order to launch Bulava. Yesterday, the submarine came back to the base in Severodvinsk. The launch of the missile was scheduled for Sunday, but no official announcements have been made. It’s worth pointing out that the Defense Ministry always makes official statements following the successful launches of ballistic missiles. Sometimes, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov personally reports the successful launches to President Vladimir Putin in front of TV journalists. A Kommersant source in the Joint Staff of the Navy Fleet noted that after Bulava’s previous launch failure on October 25 (incidentally, this was the day of the president’s annual televised conference with the Russian people), the distribution of any information about the missile test was banned. Yesterday, Igor Panarin, the press secretary of the Federal Space Agency (responsible for the creation of Bulava), neither confirmed nor denied information about the failed missile launch. He promised Kommersant that “the agency would comment right after the Defense Ministry issues its official statement.” However, the Defense Ministry was mute until yesterday evening. The head of the communications department of the Defense Ministry, Sergei Rybakov, told Kommersant then that he “is not commenting on the situation” with Bulava’s launch. According to Second Rank Captain Igor Babenko, the deputy head of the Northern Fleet’s press service, the responsibility for everything that takes place around the Bulava missile launch lies entirely on the developer—the Moscow Institute of Combustion Engineering. “The military does not have a right to comment on anything related to the tests of this missile until the missile is transferred to the fleet for service,” Babenko told Kommersant.
After the failed Bulava launches in September and October 2006, the testing program was changed. While both tests in the fall were carried out with the Donskoi submarine under water in the White Sea, the December 24 launch was done with Donskoi above water. However, the third attempt to launch Bulava within the last four months failed, too, according to the information obtained by Kommersant.
We will remind you that after three failed attempts to launch the navy’s modernized nuclear missile Bark in 1997, the Russian Security Council decided to terminate its development by the Makeev assembly plant. It was decided that work would be transferred to the Moscow Institute of Combustion Engineering, which would have to develop a modern nuclear missile that would then be produced by the Votkin factory in Udmurtiya. The Moscow Institute of Combustion Engineering had previously developed land-based ballistic missiles for the strategic-missile military force. According to a Kommersant source in the Defense Ministry, an intergovernmental commission was to start an investigation today into the Bulava launch failure. In addition, the source did not deny the possibility that the results of the work of the commission could be examined at a special meeting of the military-industrial commission led by Vice Prime Minister and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. “The failure casts doubts on carrying out the state military program to equip the Russian navy with the Bulava missile starting in 2007,” the source explained. …
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