The owner of an internet site critical of the Russian authorities in the volatile region of Ingushetia has been shot dead in police custody.
Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the ingushetiya.ru site, was a vocal critic of the region’s administration.
The Russian prosecutor’s office said an investigation into the death had been launched, Russia media report.
A post on Yevloyev’s site says he was detained by police after landing at the airport of the main town, Nazran.
The website owner was taken to hospital but died from his injuries.
Reports quoting local police said Yevloyev had tried to seize a policeman’s gun when he was being led to a vehicle. A shot was fired and Yevloyev was injured in the head.
Yevloyev was a thorn in the side of Ingush President Murat Zyazikov, a former KGB general.
His website reported on alleged Russian security force brutality in Ingushetia, an impoverished province of some half a million people, mostly Muslims, which is now more turbulent than neighbouring Chechnya.
President Zyazikov had been on the same flight as Yevloyev.
Ingushetia borders Chechnya and has suffered from overflowing unrest.
(Source-BBC News)
Reuters supplies additional information:
A lawyer for the website — which survived repeated official attempts to close it down — said police met Yevloyev at the steps of the aircraft after he flew in to Ingushetia’s airport, put him in a Volga saloon car and drove him away.
“As they drove he was shot in the temple… They threw him out of the car near the hospital,” lawyer Kaloi Akhilgov told Reuters by telephone.
“He was discovered there and they quickly put him on the operating table, which is where he died.”
Akhilgov said Yevloyev, who was in his thirties, flew from Moscow to Nazran on the same flight as the Kremlin-backed local leader Murat Zyazikov. A spokesman for Zyazikov could not be reached for comment.
A posting on Yevloyev’s website called on “all those who are not indifferent” to his killing to gather for a demonstration in Nazran, Ingushetia’s biggest town where Zyazikov’s opponents have clashed with riot police in recent years.
“A preliminary investigation is being carried out into the incident as a result of which M.Yevloyev was killed,” said Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the investigations unit of the Prosecutor General’s Office in Moscow.
Markin said police had tried to bring Yevloyev in for questioning but that an incident occurred in which he received a gunshot wound that led to his death.
Interfax news agency cited an unnamed law enforcement source as saying Yevloyev was shot by accident and said prosecutors had opened a criminal case for causing the death by carelessness.
Akhilgov said he doubted the shooting was an accident. “It was in no way a mistake,” he told Reuters.
Media freedom groups say Russia is one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists.
Magomed Yevloyev is one of the most high-profile journalists to be killed in Russia since investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead near her Moscow apartment in 2006, provoking condemnation of Russia’s record on media freedom.
Sunday, August 31st, 2008, 12:53 pm | 
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