A Kyrgyz opposition journalist died yesterday after apparently being thrown from the sixth-floor window of an apartment in Almaty with his hands and feet bound with duct tape, officials said.
A Kazakh interior ministry spokesman said the journalist, Gennady Pavlyuk, had been in a coma since he was hospitalized after the incident last Wednesday and died without regaining consciousness, Interfax-Kazakhstan said.
In Bishkek, a Kyrgyz interior ministry spokesman told reporters that Pavlyuk, 40, had been admitted to hospital with multiple injuries, including broken ribs, and was found after the fall with his hands and feet bound with duct tape.
PHOTO: REUTERS
He was a leading critic of Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev and the officials in both countries said a criminal investigation had been opened into his death.
“There is a version that it is an attempted murder,” the Kyrgyz ministry spokesman told reporters.
Pavlyuk, who wrote under the pen name Ibragim Rustambek, was in Kazakhstan’s main business and media city on a work trip.
He had been staying in a hotel in Almaty and media reports said he went to the apartment with an unknown individual on last Wednesday.
Police have found a roll of duct tape, keys to Pavlyuk’s hotel room and his jacket in the apartment.
He had worked for some of the best-known publications in the country, heading the Kyrgyz editions of Russian newspapers Komsomolskaya Pravda and Argumenty i Fakty as well as writing for the independent Bely Parakhod.
Kyrgyzstan has repeatedly come under attack for human rights violations after a series of deaths or beatings of opposition journalists in the country.
Earlier this month a Russian political analyst known for criticizing the government of Kyrgyzstan, Alexander Knyazov, was attacked in the capital Bishkek and warned against continuing his work.
“Journalists cannot go on being taken hostage by the extreme polarization of Kyrgyzstan political life,” Reporters Without Borders said after the news of Pavlyuk’s fall.
Pavlyuk had also been planning to produce a new Internet newspaper by the end of the year for the anti-Bakiyev Kyrgyz opposition party Ata Meken.
Ata Meken issued a statement saying that the “attack ... was not an accident.”
Kyrgyzstan has long been considered the region’s most politically unstable country.
Bakiyev came to power on the back of violent streets protests in 2005, promising to bring an end to the corruption of former president Askar Akayev.
Critics say, however, that he has done little to curb the country’s rampant nepotism and corruption.
They say that Bakiyev has instead focused on crushing any sign of political dissent through the use of coercion and violence.
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