The offices of Russia’s leading independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta were sprayed with an unknown substance a few days ago, and several employees felt ill afterwards. Editor-in-chief Muratov said it was an intimidation tactic to silence them, but they would not give in.
Surveillance footage shows a man with a delivery backpack riding a bicycle outside the Novaya Gazeta office in central Moscow late at night, spraying an unknown substance on the front door of the paper and then slowly walking away, taking care not to look up at the camera.
In an interview with AFP at his office, Dmitry Muratov said he had no doubt it was a “chemical attack” aimed at silencing one of the few Russian media outlets still willing to challenge the official position. “It was a military-grade, non-lethal poison used to warn newspaper employees or to get back at them.”
The newspaper cleaned up for days afterward to eliminate the unpleasant stench, and a long section of the sidewalk that had been sprayed had to be removed.
This is certainly not the first Time the paper has been attacked, let alone the worst; six journalists have been killed for their reporting since the early 2000s, and black-and-white portraits of all six now hang on the paper’s walls.
One of them, Anna Politkovskaya, a woman who covered years of human rights abuses and the Kremlin’s war in Chechnya for Novaya Gazeta, was shot to death outside her apartment in 2006 at the age of 48.
It’s no secret that when they killed Politkovskaya, I wanted to put the paper away,” said Muratov, 59, who had been editor-in-chief of the new paper for several years since 1995. … because the newspaper was putting people’s lives at risk.”
“But the journalists of the newspaper were adamantly opposed to this. They believed that if we ended the newspaper, it would be against the memory of Politkovskaya. …They convinced me.”
Muratov now says that thanks to the support of a wide reading audience, he is optimistic that the new paper will continue to make an impact and continue to provide reports from the field. The new paper has a circulation of 90,000 and its online edition receives about 500,000 visitors a day.
We’re not leaving,” Muratov said. …We will continue to live and work in Russia.”
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