Who Is Killing Russian Journalists?

Russia is among the deadliest countries in the world for reporters, and of the 13 contract-style killings since 2000, not one has been solved

by Galina Stolyarova

Each week, Rimma Maximova makes a phone call to the prosecutor's office in St. Petersburg. And each week she hears the same thing. Staff tell her they have no more information about her son Maxim's disappearance.

Maxim Maximov was her only child. He became a talented, methodical, and respected investigative journalist. At the time he went missing, aged 41, he was a special correspondent for the St. Petersburg weekly magazine Gorod. Before that he'd been a leading reporter for the Agency for Journalistic Investigations.

But one day in June 2004, Maximov left his apartment apparently planning to be out for only an hour or two. He never returned. No trace of him has ever been found, and no one has been arrested for abducting or killing him.

He is one of more than a dozen journalists believed to have been murdered in Russia because of their work since 2000, the year President Vladimir Putin came to power.

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Less than two weeks ago, Ivan Safronov, a reporter for the independent daily Kommersant who covered military affairs, fell four stories to his death from a window in his Moscow apartment building. Safronov had been questioned several times by the Federal Security Service in connection with his work but was never charged with anything, according to the Associated Press. Early police statements that suggest his death was a suicide have been rejected by Safronov's co-workers.

For her part, Rimma Maximova says she lost hope long ago, but her weekly phone call has become a habit. She says that over the more than two years since Maxim disappeared it has crept slowly into her routine, even though the inquiry has made no progress, and she knows what she will be told even before she dials the number.

Maximov was last seen on 29 June 2004. It was several days before colleagues and friends realized he was missing and sent word to his mother, who was staying in Moscow.

"I was waiting for him to call and he didn't," Maximova recalled. "He knew I was in Moscow. I called my friend; she hadn't heard from him for a week. I went straight to St. Petersburg and to the police. We opened up his flat and his computer was on, his radio and recorder were on, and it looked as if he'd only gone out for a few minutes."

Maximov's former colleagues at the Agency for Journalistic Investigations rapidly began their own inquiries. They knew that Maximov specialized in probing organized crime and corruption in high places.

But because Maximov was something of a loner, and because he was often digging into several cases at once, his fellow journalists faced a huge challenge in their detective work. They had to go through piles of paperwork trying to locate an investigation by Maximov that might have led to his death.

"Months passed before we found the answer, and it came to us by sheer accident as we were - for the umpteenth time - flipping through the pages of his voluminous files," said Alexander Gorshkov, the agency's deputy director.

Having checked out several investigations and found no leads, he says, they alighted on a probe he was making into a police anti-corruption squad. In an article he wrote shortly before he vanished, Maximov had alleged that instead of solving real crimes, the squad sometimes set up phony cases using a police stooge, who was in on the scam, to offer bribes.

"He published an article about their methods, and their methods were to provoke people into giving bribes," Maximova said. "They created a situation where a person would give a bribe and then other police units would turn up and discover it. And that's how they had a very high success rate in tackling corruption."

Gorshkov and his team learned that on the day Maximov disappeared, he'd been phoned out of the blue by a man claiming to offer him freelance work. The caller had told Maximov he wanted to set up a magazine and wanted him to write for it.

But there was one thing Maximov didn't know - the caller whom he agreed to meet that day was the man who, according to Maximov's investigation, had been offering bribes in the phony corruption cases set up by the police unit he had been investigating.