A journalist has been attacked in the Siberian city of Barnaul the day after a local blogger described him as a spy.
Grigory Pasko, whose work revealed that the Russian Navy was dumping nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan, was assaulted by two men while visiting the city on Tuesday. He had traveled to Barnaul in Russia's Altai region to lecture at the local university.
The men hit Pasko over
the head, and told him to “get out of our
town, or we'll get you,” the journalist told
the Ekho Moskvy radio station.
“I've been threatened for the past
two years, but physical violence is something new. I am sure that the
attack is related to my professional activities,” he told activist
site Activatica. “The
perpetrators of these attacks are
obvious. It has all the
marks of the FSB.”
The
attack followed an article published on
the Barnaul edition of
the Monavista news site
Monday, which called Pasko a “foreign
agent.”
The
piece, written by “patriotic blogger” Andrei Marvich, called
Pasko a spy, claiming “they do not like traitors in the
Altai [region], as well as spies and those who kill Russians in Novorossia [separatist-held regions of eastern Ukraine].”
Pasko was arrested the FSB on espionage charges while carrying out a journalistic investigation in 2001 and was jailed for four years. He was released in 2003, after being named as a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International.
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