Petersburg journalist Andrushchenko died in the hospital after the attack

The journalist of the New Petersburg weekly Nikolai Andrushchenko died in the hospital, where he spent more than a month after the attack committed on him. It is reported by Fontanka.ru.

On the evening of March 9, 73-year-old Andrushchenko went to a business meeting. At night he was picked up by an ambulance. The journalist was taken to the Mariinsky hospital with a traumatic brain injury. After some time, the victim had an operation; Then he was introduced into the medication to whom. He did not come to consciousness.

The media reported on the attack only on March 31 .

As the director of the New Petersburg told Fontanka.ru Alevtina Ageeva, two days ago the victim began to breathe on his own and he was disconnected from the apparatus of artificial ventilation of the lungs. However, on Wednesday morning, the journalist died.

After the attack, the city OP-78 opened a criminal case. However, Ageeva at the end of March noted that "the police are unlikely to make a lot of efforts to investigate, since Andrushchenko wrote a lot about the arbitrariness in the police and was not loved for intransigence."

The chief of the weekly Denis Usov, in turn, suggested that the journalist was attacked due to the sharp publications of the publication. Recently, protest promotions have been covered in New Petersburg, an ostentatious struggle of officials with corruption has been exposed, and the memoirs of journalist Dmitry Zapolsky on the connections of St. Petersburg criminals with the city administration in the 1990s were published.

Andrushchenko himself repeatedly wrote in the newspaper and gave interviews to other publications about a number of people, in the 1990s related to Vladimir Putin. This, in particular, is the leader of the Tambov criminal group Vladimir Barsukov (Kumarin) and the former director of the Dacheny Cooperative "Lake" Vladimir Smirnov. In recent years, the journalist investigated the activities of another Petersburger - the former deputy director of the State Aircount Monk Nikolai Aulov, in March 2016, declared by Spain on the international wanted list on suspicion in connection with another Tambov leaders - Gennady Petrov.

In 1990-1993, Andrushchenko was a deputy of the Leningrad City Council - Petrosovet. He supported the August putsch. In 2015, in an interview with Radio Liberty, the journalist said that one or two weeks after the suppression of the coup met Putin, at that time, Vice-mayor of the city. Putin noticed the interlocutor: "What have you done, Stepanych?! You could have arrested you! Money must be done! Money must be done! Now the time is to make money! And the country and people!" This fragment of the interview was also included in the film by Valery Balayan "Who is Mister Putin".

The journalist was a close acquaintance of Yuri Shutov - ex -deputy Lensovet and Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, former assistant mayor of the city Anatoly Sobchak. Already in the early 1990s, Shutov went into opposition to the city authorities and published the book "Sobchachka Heart". In 1999, he was arrested, and seven years later they sentenced to a life sentence on charges of custom-made murders and a number of other crimes. In December 2014, Shutov died in the White Swan colony in Solikamsk .

"New Petersburg" published Shutov's articles about corruption in power. Andrushchenko himself stated that the case against his acquaintance was fabricated.

In November 2007, shortly before the last march of disagreements, Andrushchenko was detained and then arrested in the case of obstruction of justice and slandering the judge. During the investigation, accusations of initiating hatred of law enforcement officers and insulting the prosecutor were added to the case. In conclusion, he was beaten; It was also kept in the cold without warm clothes. In February of the next year, the journalist sent a statement to Putin about the abandonment of Russian citizenship in protest against torture and bullying.

In May 2008, at the end of the investigation, Andrushchenko was released on a recognizance not to leave. In June 2009, the Dzerzhinsky District Court of St. Petersburg justified the journalist for the initially imputed accusations, gave a year conditionally on charges of extremism, freeing from punishment of the statute of limitations, and fined 20 thousand rubles, announcing guilty of insulting the prosecutor. In October of the same year, having examined the cassation appeal of the journalist, the St. Petersburg City Court released him from the penalty - also behind the expiration of the statute of limitations.

During the content in the Andrushchenko pre -trial detention center, blinded on the left eye, and also received a serious disease of the vessels of the heart.

The New Petersburg weekly in 2007 was closed by the St. Petersburg City Court. One of the reasons was the publication of Andrushchenko’s article “Why will we go on November 25 to the marsh of disagreement” (before which the journalist was detained). The ban was successfully appealed, and in 2009 the newspaper resumed the issue.