|
#1
●
07-27-2009, 06:45 AM
| ||||||||
 Sargent Poster Rank:910 Join Date: Jun 2009 Posts: 816 Mentioned: 0 Post(s) Quoted: 11 Post(s)
| ||||||||
|
Natalia Alyakina, Journalist Shot at Budyonnovsk Checkpoint, June 1995
Natalia Alyakina, 40, a Russian journalist working for the German radio news agency RUFA and the German weekly Focus, was shot dead on June 17, 1995 just after clearing a Russian Interior Ministry checkpoint on the edge of Budyonnovsk, in Russia's Stavropol region. She was driving toward the city hospital that Shamil Basayev's Chechen fighters had seized with more than a thousand hostages, travelling with her husband, the German correspondent Gisbert Mrozek. Soldiers checked their documents and waved the car through; about a hundred meters past the post, a burst from the heavy machine gun of an armoured vehicle at the checkpoint hit the car from behind, and she died within minutes. The military called it an accident. An 18-year-old conscript said he had snagged the trigger while climbing into the vehicle; in July 1996 a military court convicted him of negligent handling of a weapon and released him with a two-year suspended sentence. Her husband called the trial a cover-up and appealed unsuccessfully. The Committee to Protect Journalists lists her among journalists killed for their work.  ·  ·  ·  ·  · |
