A Russian journalist was severely beaten near Moscow yesterday, two days after assailants tried to murder a well-known reporter who worked for the prestigious Kommersantnewspaper.
Anatoly Adamchuk, who works for a regional paper, was assaulted by two men outside the newspaper’s office in Zhukovsky, near Moscow.
Colleagues say they believe the attack to be linked to his reporting on plans to cut down a nearby forest to build a controversial highway.
On Saturday Kommersant's Oleg Kashin, a 30-year-old political correspondent, was badly beaten in Moscow, leaving him in a coma with broken legs, fingers, a damaged skull and fractured jaw.
That attack, classed as attempted murder, prompted President Dmitry Medvedev to instruct the prosecutor general and the interior ministry to “take special control of the investigation”.
Adamchuk had recently written about the detention of several youths aged between 11 and 14 last week by local police for protesting against the highway construction plans of the Zhukovsky town authorities.
The town has a population of about 100,000 people.
There have been 19 unsolved murders of journalists in Russia since 2000, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which ranks the country as eighth among states where reporters are killed regularly and where the crimes remain unsolved.