On the morning of March 21, Ilyas Shurpaev, a 32-year-old reporter for Russian State TV Channel One who had moved to Moscow from Dagestan (a semi-autonomous Russian republic), was found stabbed and strangled in his Moscow apartment. Hours later, 58-year-old, Dagestan State Radio and TV Chairman Gadzhi (Gaji) Abashilov was machine-gunned near a shopping mall in the Dagestan capital Makhachkala.

The Moscow Prosecutor General ruled that Shurpaev's death was not linked to his professional activities of working as Channel One's Northern Caucasus reporter. But by Friday, police assumed that both killings relate to the victims' professional activities, reported Russia Today and AP.

Hours earlier, Shurpaev had written in his blog that his name had appeared on a blacklist of journalists barred from publishing in a Dagestani newspaper. Nastoyashcheye Vremya by RAI Novosti is the name for the "battle going on between journalists and the founders" of a Dagestani newspaper, which Shurpaev also wrote about in his blog.

Apparently, journalists were forced to write negative reports about Dagestan's government and president, according to Russia Today. Svobodnaya Respublica regularly publishes articles that criticize Dagistani leaders and other figures. Journalist Zaur Gaziev was beaten the same day his article mentioning Abashilov.

Ilyas Shurpaev wrote "nice" pieces on monasteries and salmon fishing, but because he wrote them in Dagestan, Chechnya and other parts of the north Caucasus, he was considered "dissident."

Gaji Abashilov had been editor of a local weekly newspaper Molodyozh Dagestana and still wrote a regular column and had hosted a TV show. In 2002 the Dagestan Bolsevik Party unsuccessfully sued him for defamation after a column was published suggesting the local Bolsevik's were neo-Nazis.

Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, whose investigation of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya led to the arrest of four suspects, is personally investigating Abashilov's murder.

After his beating, Gaziev said to Novayagazeta, "...all is possible in Dagestan. Your foe's foe might organize such an attack to cross him up".

Source: Follow the Media