Daily Journal: Collapse

The Novaya Gazeta website ( www.novayagazeta.ru ) has been unavailable to visitors since the morning of January 26. The editors believe that this is the result of a hacker attack. The newspaper's staff won't say when the site will be operational again.

According to representatives of the press service, it is difficult to guess who did this. “We have plenty of ill-wishers,” they say in the newspaper. Employees recall that this has happened more than once. The last collapse happened two years ago, during an online conference with the former leader of the Yabloko party, Grigory Yavlinsky.

Meanwhile, the clouds have parted over the Samara editorial office of Novaya Gazeta: the investigative department of the Investigative Committee at the Prosecutor's Office for the Samara Region suspended the investigation of two criminal cases of the use of counterfeit products by Novaya Gazeta in Samara and Samara Gazeta. The former editor of Novaya Gazeta in Samara and director of Samara Gazeta is Sergei Kurt-Adzhiev, who was told that he was not involved in the crime. Thus, the cases are not closed, but suspended “due to the absence of persons to be brought in as suspects.” The investigation into the Samara Gazeta case continues.

The first searches at the editorial office of Novaya Gazeta in Samara took place in 2007, on the eve of the “March of Dissent,” one of the organizers of which was Kurt-Adzhiev’s daughter Anastasia. All documents and computers were confiscated from the editorial office, and the newspaper ceased publication. Kurt-Adzhiev was charged with violating copyright and related rights because, according to the prosecution, he used unlicensed software.