The mystery over the disappearance of a presidential candidate deepened Monday.
Moscow's prosecutor's office announced that it had opened a murder investigation in the case of the candidate, Ivan Rybkin, only to have federal prosecutors overrule them and close the case within an hour, saying there was no evidence yet to suggest foul play in his disappearance.
Rybkin, one of five challengers to President Vladimir Putin in the election on March 14, has not been seen or heard from since Thursday night, the police and campaign advisers said. On Sunday, the police began a search for him, interviewing his wife and others and searching places he was known to frequent.
By Monday night, a spokesman for the Moscow police, Kirill Mazurin, said investigators had made no progress, despite a statement by a member of parliament, Gennady Gudkov, that Rybkin was hiding in a spa outside Moscow. Gudkov's remark proved unfounded, Mazurin said.
Gudkov, a member of the pro-Kremlin party that controls parliament, said in an interview that he had heard "informal reports" about Rybkin's whereabouts, but had no detailed information.
Earlier, he told the Interfax news agency that he believed the patron of Rybkin's party, the businessman and former Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky, had orchestrated Rybkin's disappearance -- apparently to attempt to discredit the presidential elections.
"I am 99 percent certain that this is yet another political stunt organized by Berezovsky," he told Interfax.
Russian and foreign news agencies that reported Rybkin's "discovery" based on Gudkov's remarks had to retract the reports.
"They lost Ivan Rybkin again," the news Web site Lenta.ru reported.
Rybkin's campaign manager, Kseniya Ponomaryova, described assertions that his disappearance was a hoax as "philistine." She said investigators were taking his disappearance seriously.
Berezovsky, who lives in self-exile in London after escaping a Russian criminal investigation he says is politically motivated, said he last spoke to Rybkin, whose presidential campaign he is supporting, last Wednesday afternoon. He, too, dismissed questions that Rybkin or others had concocted his disappearance.
"I am concerned about his fate," Berezovsky said in a telephone interview from London.
Russia's Central Elections Commission officially registered Rybkin as a candidate on Saturday, putting him in a field of six challengers to Putin, who is universally expected to win re-election. At the same time, the commission said that Rybkin faced a criminal investigation for falsifying signatures required to qualify him for the ballot.
On Monday, the official Russian Information Agency reported that one of Rybkin's campaign workers had been arrested in connection with the accusations of falsifications of his petitions.
‘TERRORIST ATTACK’: The convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri resulted in the ‘martyrdom of five of our armed forces,’ the Presidential Leadership Council said A blast targeting the convoy of a Saudi Arabian-backed armed group killed five in Yemen’s southern city of Aden and injured the commander of the government-allied unit, officials said on Wednesday. “The treacherous terrorist attack targeting the convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri, commander of the Second Giants Brigade, resulted in the martyrdom of five of our armed forces heroes and the injury of three others,” Yemen’s Saudi Arabia-backed Presidential Leadership Council said in a statement published by Yemeni news agency Saba. A security source told reporters that a car bomb on the side of the road in the Ja’awla area in
‘SHOCK TACTIC’: The dismissal of Yang mirrors past cases such as Jang Song-thaek, Kim’s uncle, who was executed after being accused of plotting to overthrow his nephew North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has fired his vice premier, compared him to a goat and railed against “incompetent” officials, state media reported yesterday, in a rare and very public broadside against apparatchiks at the opening of a critical factory. Vice Premier Yang Sung-ho was sacked “on the spot,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said, in a speech in which Kim attacked “irresponsible, rude and incompetent leading officials.” “Please, comrade vice premier, resign by yourself when you can do it on your own before it is too late,” Kim reportedly said. “He is ineligible for an important duty. Put simply, it was
PRECARIOUS RELATIONS: Commentators in Saudi Arabia accuse the UAE of growing too bold, backing forces at odds with Saudi interests in various conflicts A Saudi Arabian media campaign targeting the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has deepened the Gulf’s worst row in years, stoking fears of a damaging fall-out in the financial heart of the Middle East. Fiery accusations of rights abuses and betrayal have circulated for weeks in state-run and social media after a brief conflict in Yemen, where Saudi airstrikes quelled an offensive by UAE-backed separatists. The United Arab Emirates is “investing in chaos and supporting secessionists” from Libya to Yemen and the Horn of Africa, Saudi Arabia’s al-Ekhbariya TV charged in a report this week. Such invective has been unheard of
SCAM CLAMPDOWN: About 130 South Korean scam suspects have been sent home since October last year, and 60 more are still waiting for repatriation Dozens of South Koreans allegedly involved in online scams in Cambodia were yesterday returned to South Korea to face investigations in what was the largest group repatriation of Korean criminal suspects from abroad. The 73 South Korean suspects allegedly scammed fellow Koreans out of 48.6 billion won (US$33 million), South Korea said. Upon arrival in South Korea’s Incheon International Airport aboard a chartered plane, the suspects — 65 men and eight women — were sent to police stations. Local TV footage showed the suspects, in handcuffs and wearing masks, being escorted by police officers and boarding buses. They were among about 260 South
RSS