(CJES/IFEX) – Early in the morning of 11 May 2006, the 64-year-old father of REGNUM news agency correspondent Murat Gukemuhov was attacked in Cherkessk, a city in the Karachaevo-Cherkessia republic. The journalist told CJES that the day before an unknown man called the journalist’s home. “My father picked up the phone. The caller offered to […]
(CJES/IFEX) – Early in the morning of 11 May 2006, the 64-year-old father of REGNUM news agency correspondent Murat Gukemuhov was attacked in Cherkessk, a city in the Karachaevo-Cherkessia republic. The journalist told CJES that the day before an unknown man called the journalist’s home. “My father picked up the phone. The caller offered to discuss with him my most recent publications during a meeting, which he arranged for the next morning. When I learned about [the call], I immediately understood that my father was mistaken for me since my father has been in retirement for a long time and all his life he worked in agriculture and has not had anything to do with journalism,” Gukemuhov told CJES.
In the morning, when Gukemuhov was still in bed, his father left the apartment. Unidentified men were awaiting him on the first floor, and hit him on the head several times with a baseball bat. At present the journalist’s father is in the intensive care unit of a hospital and is in grave condition.
Gukemuhov believes that the attack was intended to be carried out on him but that an attacker mistook his father for him in the darkness. Gukemuhov told CJES that he links the threats and the assault to his reports about Ali Kaitov, the son-in-law of Mustafa Badtiev, the president of Karachaevo-Cherkessia, as well as his articles about public disorder connected with Kaitov’s case. Kaitov was arrested for organising the killing of seven entrepreneurs.
The journalist also told CJES that earlier he had been summoned to the government press office and offered remuneration if he would stop writing about Kaitov’s trial, but that he had refused to do so.
During one of the Karachaevo-Cherkessia Supreme Court sessions on the case of Kaitov and his followers, the defendants had threatened the journalist.
“I was already questioned at the police station in regards to the attack on my father and the threats. However, I do not know whether they will look for both the mastermind and the people who carried out the crime. As far as for me, I can guess who was behind this but I do not have evidence,” said Gukemuhov. In his opinion, criminal elements who are connected to President Batdiev’s son-in-law and helped him to deal with the entrepreneurs, may be the masterminds.
The journalist pointed out that an environment of intolerance of freedom of speech has taken shape in Karachaevo-Cherkessia. Journalists are constantly threatened here, and the republic is in an information vacuum.
