Several suspects have reportedly been identified in last year’s targeting of Margarita Simonyan
The Russian Investigative Committee has completed an investigation into an assassination plot targeting RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, the Kommersant daily reported on Sunday.
Last July, Russian law enforcement announced it had thwarted a Ukrainian plan to kill the journalist, involving a group of Russian neo-Nazis who were offered $16,600 as payment.
“Deepest gratitude to our law enforcement officers for their work, from me and my family,” Simonyan wrote, reacting to the Kommersant report on her Telegram channel.
The SBU (Ukrainian security service) reportedly recruited individuals for the job from the Paragraph 88 neo-nazi group, after seeing videos of them beating foreign nationals from Central Asia, which they recorded and posted online.
The attackers did not know that their negotiations were monitored by Russian law enforcement, the report says. When several young people arrived at a meeting place to receive an advance payment and an assault rifle, they were detained by special forces.
More than ten people were allegedly involved in the criminal case, some of whom have confessed to separate attacks, but deny plotting an attempt on the life of Simonyan, Kommersant reported.
The defendants claimed they had wanted to be paid in advance, but did not receive any money when they went to retrieve an assault rifle from a cache prepared by the organizers.
The newspaper has named Mikhail Balashov and Yegor Savelyev as suspected organizers of the group. The two men have been charged with an assassination attempt for political reasons, illegal arms trafficking, incitement of hatred, as well as terrorism and extremism.
Back in April, the SBU – Kiev’s successor to the Soviet KGB – announced new criminal charges against Simonyan, accusing her of being a “propagandist” who is furthering “Russian narratives” and endangering Ukrainian sovereignty.
The agency also claims that Simonyan called for “mass killings of Ukrainian children” in December 2023. However, it failed to provide evidence of any such remark.
In an earlier post on social media, she said the Ukrainians would have a hard time justifying the murder of a journalist and a mother of several children – but that falsely accusing her of inciting violence would make an assassination “appear more palatable.”
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