Russian Independent Journalist Stabbed in Neck at Moscow Office

By Christopher Brennan, New York Daily News

23 October 17

 

journalist for independent Russian broadcaster Echo Moskvy was attacked with a knife at her office.

Tatyana Felgengauer was rushed to the hospital Monday afternoon after an attack at the radio station's office in Moscow, according to her editor

Alexander Venediktov said in a broadcast that his deputy editor was stabbed in the neck, and that she was hospitalized in "medium" condition and underwent an operation.

He said that it is believed she will survive, and that the attacker, later identified as Boris Grits, had been detained.

It was not immediately clear why Grits would stab Felgengauer, who broadcast Monday morning with guests including Pyotr Verzilov, an activist married to Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.

Echo shared a blog post from a man with the same name who accused Felgengauer of sexually harassing him with telepathy.

Prosecutors classified their investigation as one for attempted murder.

The attack on Felgengauer comes one week after Malta journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who reported on politicians in her country's links to offshore accounts in the Panama Papers leak, was killed with a car bomb.

Galizia had frequently targeted leading officials on her personal blog, with her family successfully demanding that one of them, the prosecutor assigned to investigate her death, recuse herself.

Sources told The Malta Independent that investigators are looking into an international organized crime group as part of the plot to kill the writer with military-grade explosives not found on the island.

The paper reported that a local resident with ties to the group could have "commissioned" the bombing on Galizia, whose investigative work included probing alleged payments from the ruling family of Azerbaijan to Maltese officials.

"We are looking at a situation now where no journalist feels safe, and the journalists never feel safe again," Maltese Member of European Parliament Roberta Metsola told the Daily News last week at a vigil in Brussels.

Committee to Protect journalist figures show that since 1992 almost 60 journalists have been killed in Russia, with two killed earlier this year in St. Petersburg and Siberia.

Felgengauer's colleague at Echo, Yulia Latynina, announced this September that she was leaving the country after a string of attacks including her car going up in flames.