Moscow thwarts plans to assassinate two female journalists, one loyal and the other opposition
Russia’s Interfax news agency reported that a Moscow court on Saturday brought criminal charges against seven people who sought “out of national hatred” to kill two prominent Russian journalists in a “Ukraine-backed plot”.
The agency added that the court agreed to detain five minors (born in 2005 and 2006) until September 14 on “criminal rioting charges, and two men it said were members of an organized group.”
And the agency stated that the Russian Federal Security Service arrested, on Friday, people whose number was not mentioned, and said that they carried out reconnaissance operations near the homes of Margarita Simonyan and Ksenia Sobchak and their places of work.
The arrests took place in Moscow and in the Russian Ryazan region, and Moscow confirmed that the detainees belonged to a group of neo-Nazis called “Paragraph 88” who were recruited by the Ukrainian services.
And the federal security services published pictures showing the arrest of a number of suspects, in addition to weapons and books about Nazism that were seized during these arrests.
from the arrest process
of the seizures with the detainees
of the seizures with the detainees
Interfax quoted the agency as saying that the detainees had confessed to preparing the attack on the two journalists on behalf of Ukraine, and that they had been promised a reward of 1.5 million Russian rubles ($16,620).
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine, which in the past has denied involvement in assassinations of people inside Russia who support the war.
Simonyan is the editor-in-chief of the state-owned Russia Today channel and one of Russia’s most famous media figures.
Sobchak is a well-known journalist and TV presenter who also ran for the presidency in 2018. She is a popular influencer who is often critical of the Russian authorities and has expressed her disapproval of the Russian military operation in Ukraine.
In a statement, on Saturday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova condemned “A new attempt to launch a terrorist attack” by the “Kiev regime”.
And it lasts Attacks or assassination attempts Almost regularly, Russian activists support the war in Ukraine. Moscow accuses the Ukrainian authorities of being behind the matter, but the latter denies or does not comment on these incidents.
