Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [146]
AN ALLEGED PARTICIPANT IN A PLANNED ATTACK ON KHODORKOVSKY’S PENAL COLONY HAS BEEN FOUND GUILTY
In the Basmanny Court in Moscow sentence has been passed in the case of Vladimir Zelensky. Zelensky informed Novaya gazeta’s columnist, Anna Politkovskaya, of a supposedly imminent attack on the penal colony in which Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos oil company, is imprisoned. Zelensky was sentenced to three years in a strict-regime corrective labor colony for “knowingly communicating false information about an act of terrorism.”
This bizarre episode has amazed Zelensky’s lawyer and other participants in the trial, and left numerous questions unanswered. Zelensky himself refused to give evidence, readily pleaded guilty, and asked only that the trial should be over and done with as quickly as possible.
What Zelensky actually said before his arrest is described in Anna Politkovskaya’s article. Zelensky phoned Anna Politkovskaya in spring this year, saying he trusted only her and had important information relating to Khodorkovsky. He gave her a note about the alleged plot to force Khodorkovsky to “escape.”
Zelensky named a certain Babakov as the organiser of the plot, a former agent of the Tajikistan KGB, and insistently asked for a meeting to be arranged between him (Zelensky) and Khodorkovsky’s relatives or some of his former colleagues, like Leonid Nevzlin.
The tale had the air of a hoax or complete nonsense, but a subsequent psychiatric examination of Zelensky revealed no mental problems. When arrested in Chita he was found indeed to have a fake passport in the name of a citizen of Tajikistan which he had been using to cross the border and also a plan detailing the attack on the colony.
A native of Sochi, Krasnodar District, Vladimir Zelensky is a former soldier who graduated from the Saratov Higher Military Command Academy of Chemical Warfare Defence. He had been sentenced to six years in jail by a Novosibirsk court for causing grievous bodily harm but was released on parole in August 2004 with almost three years of his sentence suspended, which the Basmanny Court has now re-imposed. He confessed unconditionally to the charge of knowingly communicating false information about an act of terrorism.
Zelensky refused to choose a defence lawyer and the court appointed Anatoliy Avilov, Chairman of the Basmanny Court in 1992–5, to act for him. Avilov finds the case puzzling. He suggests that Zelensky’s story was so implausible from the outset that no crime was committed. Neither can he understand why Zelensky should have admitted the charge before he had even been formally identified, hence before it was clear whether the man who came to Novaya gazeta’s offices was in fact him or a different person with a passport in his name.
“It is all very strange,” Avilov says. “Anyone making a knowingly false statement will usually try to stay out of sight, but Zelensky came forward. Why he should have done that is something only he knows, but I believe it is entirely possible that somebody impersonated him.”
A number of curious coincidences invite us to think this has been a deliberate dirty trick. After Zelensky came to the newspaper with his story, two public statements were made: the first by a Deputy of Zhirinovsky’s far-right Liberal-Democratic Party, who informed the press that Novaya gazeta was in possession of important information which it was withholding from the law enforcement agencies. The second, by a prominent political commentator, also accused the editors of withholding information about an imminent crime.
These speakers made their declarations very categorically and with great aplomb, unaware that by then we had passed all the information to the relevant agencies.
Following Vladimir Zelensky’s sentencing on the basis of these very strange happenings,