"It seems clear to me that they're not doing an investigation or a disclosure but a cover-up," Gisbert Mrozek said at a press conference Wednesday. "If you close the public's eyes like this then this kind of thing goes on indefinitely."
His wife, Natalya Alyakina, died in his arms June 17, minutes after a young soldier fired at the couple's car. The driver was also wounded.
Alyakina worked for Germany's RUFA news agency and was covering the hostage crisis with Mrozek, a correspondent for German magazine Focus.
Mrozek's lawyers received direct information from the military prosecutor for the first time as late as last Thursday, when according to Mrozek, officials told them considerably less than had already appeared in the press.
The official explanation, published in Friday's Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, states that the shot was fired by accident.
Mrozek called the explanation "insane" and said that while he did not have the evidence to completely rule out that the shooting was an accident, "the more probable version in my opinion is that they wanted to give her a fright -- as they have wanted many times before -- and they hit her. And if that's what happened then in any case it's murder."
A letter from Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, received June 27, was the first letter of condolence from a Russian official. No Russian officials came to Alyakina's funeral, Mrozek said.
"It's quite possible that it will get to the point where nobody will be held responsible for Natalya's death," said Mrozek's lawyer, Aleksander Asnis. To avoid this, public figures in Germany have drafted a letter to President Boris Yeltsin about setting up an independent international commission to investigate Alyakina's death and similar incidents.
As an example of the behavior of the military prosecutor, Mrozek said that after the inquest the prosecutor told him his wife had had a tumor the size of a fist. "She would have died soon anyway and would only have suffered," he quoted the prosecutor as saying. The doctor who performed the autopsy denied it had revealed such a tumor, he said.
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