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Friday, March 10, 2000
Russian crash victims had received threats
http://www.vny.com/cf/News/upidetail.cfm?QID=70164
Thursday, 9 March 2000 20:59 (ET)
Russian journalist, oil executive among nine killed in plane crash
http://dallasnews.com/world/46272_RUSSIA10.html
03/10/2000
New York Times News Service
Borovik: Investigative journalist
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_671000/671886.stm
Thursday, 9 March, 2000, 16:46 GMT
Borovik founded Russia's first newspaper dedicated to investigative journalism
By Russian affairs analyst, Stephen Dalziel
Photo: Plane crash http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/670000/images/_671886_plane300.jpg
Photo: Artyom Borovik http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/670000/images/_671886_borovik300.jpg
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Russian crash victims had received threats
http://www.vny.com/cf/News/upidetail.cfm?QID=70164
Thursday, 9 March 2000 20:59 (ET)
MOSCOW, March 9 (UPI) - The passengers aboard a Russian Yak-40 jet that crashed Thursday killing all those on board included two prominent figures who had received threats in the past.
The Yak-40 was making a charter flight from Moscow to Kiev, Ukraine, when it crashed on Thursday, seconds after take-off, killing all nine people on board.
The casualties include a well-known television reporter, Artyom Borovik, who heads the Sovershenno Sekretno television production company and a publishing firm part-owned by U.S. media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman; and the president of the Oil Alliance company, Ziya Bazhayev. They were among five crew and four passengers on the plane, all of whom died.
Officials at Moscow's Sheremetievo-1 airport said the plane crashed around 8:40 a.m., dropping to the ground from an altitude of 50 meters immediately after take-off, crashing just beyond the end of the runway and bursting into flames.
The airport was closed after the accident, but reopened two hours later.
The Yak-40 twin-jet is used mainly for short-haul flights and can carry up to 30 passengers. The aircraft that crashed was reconfigured for executivetravel, and was reportedly leased by the LUKoil company.
Investigators are not excluding a possible terrorist act, with aides to both Borovik and Bazhayev telling United Press International that the two men had received threats and were known to have powerful enemies.
Borovik specialized in exposes, in-depth investigative reports on many notorious figures in business and politics, while Bazhayev, an ethnic Chechen, had reportedly been asked on several occasions to provide financial assistance to the Chechen separatist cause. Bazhayev, a very wealthy man, apparently rejected these approaches, angering powerful warlords in Chechnya.
A spokesman for Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said the investigation could not exclude a terrorist act at this time.
Officials at the airport, who have already recovered one of the "blackboxes" that register the aircraft's technical parameters, said they wereamazed by the aircraft's crash and explosion.
The Yak-40 is a reliable workhorse of Russian airlines, and crashesinvolving the model are rare. The plane that crashed was 24 years old, butthe aircraft owner, the Vologda flying division, insisted the jet was in sound condition after a thorough overhaul.
However, one aviation source said the jet was due to be scrapped next year.
-- Copyright 2000 by United Press International. All rights reserved. --
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Russian journalist, oil executive among nine killed in plane crash http://dallasnews.com/world/46272_RUSSIA10.html 03/10/2000 New York Times News Service
MOSCOW - A top Russian investigative journalist and a leading petroleum executive were among nine people killed early Thursday when a chartered jet crashed on takeoff from Moscow's main domestic airport.
The journalist, Artyom Borovik, and the head of the oil-trading company Alliance Group, Ziya Bazhayev, had taken off for Kiev when the three-engine Yak-40 passenger jet apparently tipped sideways and slammed into the runway. Two other oil-company employees and five crew members also died in the crash.
There was immediate speculation that the two men had been slain in one of the violent feuds that periodically rock the top echelons of Russian industry and politics. Moscow transportation investigators opened a criminal inquiry into whether the flight violated air-safety rules, and one official told the Interfax news service that a terrorist act had not been ruled out as a cause of the crash.
An official of the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the Soviet KGB, said Thursday night that Mr. Bazhayev, who is of Chechen descent, had received threats because he had refused to supply weapons to rebels in the war in Chechnya.
But there was no way to document that accusation. Nor was there any evidence of foul play. The plane's flight-data recorder was recovered and will be analyzed for evidence of the cause of the crash.
Mr. Borovik was something of a legend in Russian journalism. The son of a famous Soviet-era foreign correspondent, he became famous for his highly critical dispatches on the war in Afghanistan. His articles, published just as Mikhail Gorbachev had begun loosening controls over freedom of expression, caused a sensation.
Mr. Bazhayev's Alliance Group was well known in petroleum-industry circles. But unlike some Russian tycoons who have won both wealth and notoriety in the oil business, his was not a household name.
Mr. Bazhayev, who would have been 40 in July, served in the mid-1990s as the president of Yunko, a government-controlled enterprise created to manage Chechnya's petroleum business. He later became head of a huge but financially troubled oil producer, Sidanko. The company has since gone bankrupt.
According to the Russian business press, Mr. Bazhayev's company was struggling this month with Sidanko executives over the disposition of a Sidanko subsidiary deeply in debt to Alliance Group.
It was not clear why the two men were flying to Kiev. An Alliance Group executive was quoted on Moscow television as saying that Mr. Borovik and Mr. Bazhayev were old friends and were discussing a joint business venture.
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Borovik: Investigative journalist http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_671000/671886.stm Thursday, 9 March, 2000, 16:46 GMT Borovik founded Russia's first newspaper dedicated to investigative journalism By Russian affairs analyst, Stephen Dalziel
Artyom Borovik, who died on Thursday in a plane crash in Moscow, was the Soviet Union's first real investigative journalist.
He cut his teeth in the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Taking full advantage of the policy of "glasnost" - openness - declared by the then Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr Borovik pointed out to the Soviet people that the army had not gone into Afghanistan solely on a peace-keeping mission.
It was fighting a war, and Soviet soldiers were being killed.
After Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Mr Borovik, who was working for the popular journal Ogonyok, took part in a unique exchange with an American journalist from Life magazine, and spent a month training with a unit of the US Army.
This, as well as his experiences in Afghanistan, persuaded Mr Borovik that the Soviet Army was desperately in need of reform.
Top Secret
In 1990, he founded the country's first newspaper dedicated to investigative journalism, Top Secret.
Corruption in the army, the shady work of the KGB, the misdemeanours of politicians: all were seen as fair game for Top Secret.
Following the success of this venture, Mr Borovik expanded his output to start the Top Secret television channel.
He was the author, too, of a number of books, most notably a recent - and unflattering - study of a man seen as one of Russia's most influential tycoons, Boris Berezovsky.
This was typical of the investigative nature of Mr Borovik's work, which made him a number of enemies.
For this reason, a government commission has already been set up to look into the plane crash under the chairmanship of the Minister for Emergency Situations, Sergei Shoigu.
Russia has already seen too many top level murders in recent years for foul play to be ruled out in this case.
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Photo: Plane crash http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/670000/images/_671886_plane300.jpg
Photo: Artyom Borovik http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/670000/images/_671886_borovik300.jpg
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