BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

Oct 24, 2005

Belarusian journalist for opposition paper found dead

Vasily Grodnikov, a Belarusian freelance journalist, was found dead in his apartment on October 18. Colleagues and press freedom watchdogs suspect that he was murdered because of his work for the independent Narodnaya Volya newspaper.

The newspaper is highly critical of President Aleksandr Lukashenko's government and is banned from state-run kiosks. Media watchdogs say that authorities recently ended the newspaper's printing contract, forcing the newspaper to print from the nearby Russian city of Smolensk.

The Interior Ministry for the Minsk region said that the cause for Grodnikov's death was a stroke. But according to opposition news reports, including the Charter 97 Press Center, the Minsk Regional Clinical Hospital's autopsy concluded that he died from trauma to the head. Charter 97 also reported that the Minsk regional prosecutor's office would not launch an investigation into the death for at least two weeks, if they investigate at all.

Belarusian journalist Veronika Cherkasova was murdered in 2004. Watchdogs concluded that she was killed because of her work for opposition newspaper Solidarnost. Her murder remains unsolved by local officials.

Narodnaya Volya Editor-in-Chief Josef Siaredzich told the Belarusan Association of Journalists (BAJ) that, "No one else in Narodnaya Volya wrote so beautifully in Belarusian as Vasil Hrodnikau could."

Source:

http://www.ijnet.org/FE_Article/newsarticle.asp?UILang=1&CId=303832&CIdLang=1

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