One of Russia's leading independent voices on television was silenced on Wednesday when the channel NTV fired the host of a current affairs program over an interview with the widow of a former Chechen leader.
Leonid Parfyonov, the host of Namedni (The Other Day) whose hour-long weekly broadcast was the only televised scrutiny to which the Kremlin was still subjected, is one of Russia's best-known journalists. His dismissal was a "revolutionary and momentous" step against press freedoms in Russia, and an "order from a police state," said the Union of Journalists and the Russian Pen Center.
Parfyonov was forced to drop a five-and-a-half-minute segment from the program in which he interviewed the widow of a former Chechen rebel leader who was assassinated earlier this year in Qatar.
Namedni interviewed Malika Yandarbiyev, whose husband, Zelimkhan, Russia had accused of being a member of al-Qaeda. The government claimed he helped organize the mass hostage-taking incident when the Moscow Nord Ost theater was seized by Chechen gunmen in October 2002.
Yandarbiyev was killed when a bomb blew up his car in Doha on Feb. 13. Two Russian agents are on trial in Doha for his murder and face the death penalty if convicted.
The segment was broadcast in Siberia, yet withdrawn, reportedly at the request of the security services before Namedni was broadcast in Moscow.
Parfyonov gave a copy of the order he received to drop the interview to the newspaper Kommersant. Kommersant also received a transcript of the interview in which Yandarbiyev describes looking one of the accused Russians in the eye in court and says her husband wanted to die fighting in Chechnya. Their son, Daud, 13, was injured in the blast.
Moscow has repeatedly voiced its fury at Doha and is engaged in intense diplomatic efforts to free its agents.
A statement on NTV's Web site said Parfyonov was sacked because he had broken his contract of employment which obliged him "to support the politics of the company's leadership."
Nikolai Senkevich, NTV's director, said Parfyonov was "one of the most talented journalists in Russia," but this was not the first incident of disobedience. Parfyonov, told Ekho Moskvi radio he had officially been fired to "cut costs," despite repeated NTV statements that he had violated his contract by revealing internal secrets.
He said NTV managers persuaded him to hold the exclusive interview up for a week, but foreign media began asking if they could have a copy of the tape and when it would be broadcast.
"I can't be guided by motives other than distributing information. If we have an exclusive and I am ordered not to put it on air, but also protect those who prevent this ... you have to understand my position."
Asked how he had continued working amid NTV's restrictive conditions, he said: "Maybe it was impossible, but sometimes you sit in an airless room and just resist. Or you sit in the gate at the airport, hoping that soon you will take off."
Namedi was the last remaining sign of NTV's former life as the Kremlin's key critic, particularly over the decade-long Chechen war.
The channel was bought by the state gas giant Gazprom in 2001 and has since begun, like all other channels, to toe the Kremlin line.
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