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07-27-2009, 06:45 AM
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 Sargent Poster Rank:917 Join Date: Jun 2009 Posts: 814 Mentioned: 0 Post(s) Quoted: 11 Post(s)
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Natalia Alyakina, Journalist Shot at Budyonnovsk Checkpoint, June 1995
On June 17, 1995, Russian journalist Natalia Alyakina, 40, was fatally shot after her car was permitted through a Russian Interior Ministry roadblock near Budyonnovsk, in Russia's Stavropol region. Employed by the German radio news agency RUFA and the German weekly Focus, she was driving with her husband, German correspondent Gisbert Mrozek, toward the city hospital. Shamil Basayev's Chechen fighters had taken control of the hospital and were holding more than a thousand hostages. Troops inspected the couple's papers before allowing them to continue. Roughly a hundred meters beyond the checkpoint, gunfire from the heavy machine gun mounted on an armoured vehicle there struck the car from the rear. Alyakina died minutes later. The military characterized her death as accidental. An 18-year-old conscript said the trigger became caught as he climbed into the vehicle. A military court convicted him of negligent handling of a weapon in July 1996 and released him with a two-year suspended sentence. Gisbert Mrozek said the trial was a cover-up, but his appeal failed. The Committee to Protect Journalists records Natalia Alyakina as a journalist killed for her work.  ·  ·  ·  ·  · |
