The Investigative Committee opened a case of attack on the editor-in-chief of the Kiselevsk News publication

In Kuzbass, a case was opened on obstruction of journalistic activities (part 3 of article 144 of the Criminal Code) because of the attack on the editor-in-chief of Novosti Kiselevsk Natalya Zubkova. This was told to OVD-Info by her lawyer Irina Ruchko.

At the end of February 2021, Zubkova was attacked while walking her dog: an unknown person threw her into the snow and threatened to kill her daughters if the woman “opens her mouth just once more.” The journalist filed many applications with the police, the FSB and the Investigative Committee, but the law enforcement agencies did not react to them in any way. After that, the journalist left the city.

In the morning, an investigator from the Kiselevsk Department of the Investigative Committee arrived with the police at Zubkova’s rented apartment in Yekaterinburg to summon her for interrogation, Taiga.ru reports. info". According to the agenda, she is invited as a victim to the building where the Department of Economic Security and Anti-Corruption of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the region, as well as the Center "E" work.

The journalist herself considered the invitation a “pretext”, and continues to associate the interest of law enforcement officers with her journalistic activities.

As lawyer Irina Ruchko told OVD-Info, the interrogation did not take place in the end - “it was not possible to appear on the agenda.”

• In May 2020, the prosecutor's office demanded that an administrative case be opened against Natalya Zubkova for disseminating false information due to articles about underground fires, but was refused.
• The journalist claimed that her apartment in Kiselevsk was being tapped: after her conversation with a SOTA correspondent, a text with verbatim quotations from their conversation was published on the site “Without Censorship”. The SOTA journalist herself, who came to the Kemerovo region from Moscow, spoke about surveillance in the region.
• The Kemerovo website Abazhur wrote about the persecution of Natalya Zubkova. On February 20, 2021, its editor-in-chief Roman Kupriyanov was searched in the case of illegal access to computer information.

The case was initiated due to the publication on the Abazhur YouTube channel of four videos with an audio recording of a conversation at a reception with Governor Tsivilev. Kupriyanov himself links the initiation of the case and the search with a campaign in the region against independent journalists.