Yuri Shchekochikhin | |
|---|---|
Юрий Щекочихин | |
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| Born | 9 June 1950 |
| Died | 3 July 2003 (aged 53) Moscow, Russia |
| Cause of death | Illness; radiation poisoning suspected |
Yuri Petrovich Shchekochikhin (‹ThetemplateLang-rus is beingconsidered for deletion.› Russian:Ю́рий Петро́вич Щекочи́хин,IPA:[ˈjʉrʲɪjpʲɪˈtrovʲɪtɕɕːɪkɐˈtɕixʲɪn]; 9 June 1950 – 3 July 2003) was a Soviet and later Russianinvestigative journalist, writer, and liberal lawmaker in the Russian parliament. Shchekochikhin wrote and campaigned against the influence oforganized crime and corruption. His last non-fiction book,Slaves of the KGB, was about people who worked asKGB informers.
As a journalist for the newspaperNovaya Gazeta (NG), Shchekochikhin investigatedapartment bombings allegedly directed by the Russian secret services and theThree Whales Corruption Scandal which involved high-rankingFSB officers and was associated with money laundering through theBank of New York.
Shchekochikhin died suddenly on 3 July 2003 from a mysterious illness a few days before his scheduled departure to theUnited States, where he planned to meet withFBI investigators. His medical documents, according to NG, were either lost or destroyed by authorities.[1] The symptoms of his illness fit a pattern of poisoning byradioactive materials and were similar to the symptoms ofNikolai Khokhlov,Roman Tsepov, andAlexander Litvinenko. According to Litvinenko and news reports, the death of Yuri Shchekochikhin was a politically motivatedassassination.[2][3]
Shchekochikhin was born inKirovabad,Azerbaijan SSR in June 1950 and was of Azerbaijani origin.
Shchekochikhin graduated from the Journalism Department ofMoscow State University in 1975. He worked as aninvestigative journalist atKomsomolskaya Pravda (1972–1980) andLiteraturnaya Gazeta (1980–1996), and then as a deputy editor of the liberal newspaperNovaya Gazeta (from 1996). Beginning in the 1990s, he published many articles critical of theFirst andSecond Chechen Wars, human rights abuses in theRussian army, statecorruption, and other social issues.
In the summer of 1988, Shchekochikhin published an interview with a lieutenant colonel of themilitiaAleksander Gurov, in which the existence of organized crime in theSoviet Union was first publicly stated. That brought fame to both Gurov (who became the head of the 6th Agency of the MVD of the USSR which struggled against organized crime) and Shchekochikhin.[4]
Yuri Shchekochikhin began his political career in 1990, when he was elected as a representative to theCongress of People's Deputies. He was elected to the RussianState Duma from the liberalYabloko party in 1995. He was a member of a Duma committee on the problems ofcorruption, and was aUN expert on the problems of organized crime. He was a vocal opponent of theFirst andSecond Chechen Wars.
Since early 1995, he has been an author and host of an investigative journalism program called "Special Team" onORT, Russian television's first channel (then owned byBoris Berezovsky). In October 1995, the heads of the channel closed the program. According to Shchekochikhin, the reason was an episode called "For Motherland! For Mafia!", which was devoted to the Chechen War and was unleashed, in his opinion, by the "leading banks of Russia".[4]
In 2000, he accused Russia's Deputy PMIlya Klebanov of covering up the fact that Russia did not have the resources to attempt a rescue of theKursk submarine crew.[5]
From 2002, Shchekochikhin was a member of theSergei Kovalev Commission, which investigated allegations that the1999 Moscow apartment bombings had been orchestrated by the RussianFederal Security Service (FSB) to generate support for the war.[6]
One of Shchekochikhin's last articles before his death was "Are we Russia or KGB of Soviet Union?".[7] It described such issues as the refusal of the FSB to explain to the Russian Parliament what poison gas was released during theMoscow theater hostage crisis, and the work of secret services fromTurkmenistan, which operated with impunity in Moscow against Russian citizens of Turkmеn origin.
He also tried to investigate theThree Whales Corruption Scandal and criminal activities ofFSB officers related tomoney laundering through theBank of New York and illegal actions ofYevgeny Adamov, a former Russian Minister of Nuclear Energy.[8][9][10] The Three Whales case was under the personal control of PresidentVladimir Putin.[11] In June 2003, Shchekochikhin contacted theFBI and received an American visa to discuss the case with US authorities.[8] However, he never reached the USA because of his sudden death. Some Russian media claimed that Putin had issued an order to discharge 19 high-ranking FSB officers involved in this case in September 2006 as part of a Kremlin power struggle, but all of these officers continued to work in their FSB positions as of November 2006.[12]
Shchekochikhin died suddenly on 3 July 2003 after a mysterious 16-day illness.[8] It was officially declared that he died from an allergicLyell's syndrome.[4] His medical treatment and his post-mortem took place at theCentral Clinical Hospital, which is "tightly controlled by theRussian Federal Security Service because it treats top-ranking Russian officials". His relatives were denied an official medical report about the cause of his illness, and were forbidden to take specimens of his tissues for an independent medical investigation.[13] Journalists ofNovaya Gazeta managed to send his tissue specimens to "major foreign specialists". The experts did not reach any definite conclusion.[14] This caused widespread speculation about the cause of his death, especially since another member of the Kovalev commission,Sergei Yushenkov, was assassinated the same year[15][16] and the legal counsel and investigator of the commission,Mikhail Trepashkin, was arrested by Russian authorities.[17]
Some news reports drew parallels between the poisonings of Shchekochikhin,Alexander Litvinenko, and presidentVladimir Putin’s former bodyguardRoman Tsepov, who died in a similar way inSt. Petersburg in September 2004.[13] Others notedLecha Islamov, a Chechen rebel, who died in a Russian prison in 2004. “All three cases of poisoning – of Islamov, Shchekochikhin and Litvinenko – are united not only by the clinical picture, which is identical even in terms of the details, but also by the fact that the traces of the poisoners clearly point to one address: Moscow, Lubyanka (FSB headquarters),” according to aChechenpress report written byZelimkhan Khadzhiev.[18]
Shchekochikhin's last published book wasSlaves of the KGB: 20th Century. The Religion of Betrayal (Рабы ГБ. XX век. Религия предательства), tells the real stories of some of the many people forcibly recruited by the RussianKGB (the domestic operations of which later became theFSB) to work as undercover informers or agents. These people virtually became their KGB controllers' slaves, betraying their relatives, close friends and colleagues. When he died, he had not finished working on a book about the 20th Century wars inChechnya.
In an interview he gave just before his death, he said
Many years ago we...summed up the mafia in the following phrase:The lion has jumped. This year, in January, we gave the mafia the following characterization:The lion has jumped and is already wearing epaulets. By comparison what is going on today inour security services, inour prosecutor's office, all bandits are simply boy scouts. Today, it is precisely the people who are needed to fight crime and corruption that have raised the flag of corruption and crime. This has not bypassed the secret police; what has never happened before happens constantly now - theprotection that they provide, the enormous amounts of money they receive, and the control over ports and banks that they exercise.
At the request of theNovaya Gazeta newspaper staff, the Investigative Committee of the General Prosecutor's Office of Russia reopened the investigation into his death on 27 October 2007.[20] In April 2008, an Investigative Committee official said that there would be another test carried out on his tissue to ascertain whether there had been a case of poisoning.[21] TheProsecutor General of Russia closed the criminal case in April 2009 after the examination had failed to prove poisoning or violent death.[22][23]
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