Respected Russian journalist Ivan Safronov, who reported on military affairs, mysteriously plunged to his death from the 5th floor of his apartment building Friday, making him the 14th journalist to die under questionable circumstances in Putin's Russia, according to statistics compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists. [..]
Polikovskaya's killing, the 13th since Putin took office, led the Committee to Protect Journalists to declare Russia "the third deadliest country in the world for journalists" after Iraq and Algeria in their recent report, "Deadly News." All of the cases remain unsolved.
According to a report in this morning's Moscow Times, Safronov, who wrote for the Russian business newspaper "Kommersant," fell head first and fully clothed from a 5th floor window although he lived in an apartment on the 3rd floor of the building.
The Times reported the FSB -- the Federal Security Bureau, which is the successor agency to the KGB -- was unhappy with Safronov's reporting on sensitive weapons systems.
Safronov's death adds to the list of critics of the Putin regime and the FSB, who have died or been injured in strange circumstances in just the past six months
Investor's Business Daily thinks Putin couldn't be this thick, but even NewsMax (hardly a liberal publication) finds it hard to believe that all these people connected to critics of Putin's are meeting their end under strange circumstances.
