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Mystery surrounds missing Russian politician
(NYtimes)
Updated: 2004-02-10 14:54
The mystery over the disappearance of a presidential candidate deepened
Monday.
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| Ivan Rybkin (L) and businessman Boris
Berezovsky talk together in a helicopter in the Chechen capital Grozny in
this November 12, 1996 file photo.[Reuters] |
Moscow's prosecutor's office announced that it had opened a murder
investigation in the case of the candidate, Ivan P. Rybkin, only to have federal
prosecutors overrule them and close the case within an hour, saying there was no
evidence yet to suggest foul play, New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Mr. Rybkin, one of five challengers to President Vladimir V. Putin in the
election on March 14, has not been seen or heard from since Thursday night, the
police and campaign advisers said. On Sunday, the police began a search for him,
interviewing his wife and others and searching places he was known to frequent.
By Monday night, a spokesman for the Moscow police, Kirill V. Mazurin, said
investigators had made no progress, despite a statement by a member of
Parliament, Gennadi V. Gudkov, that Mr. Rybkin was hiding in a spa outside
Moscow. Mr. Gudkov's remark proved unfounded, Mr. Mazurin said.
Mr. Gudkov, a member of the pro-Kremlin party that controls Parliament, said
in an interview that he had heard "informal reports" about Mr. Rybkin's
whereabouts, but had no detailed information.
Earlier, he told the Interfax news agency that he believed that the patron of
Mr. Rybkin's party, the businessman and former Kremlin insider Boris A.
Berezovsky, had orchestrated Mr. Rybkin's disappearance to discredit the
presidential elections. "I am 99 percent certain that this is yet another
political stunt organized by Berezovsky," he said.
Russian and foreign news agencies that reported Mr. Rybkin's "discovery"
based on Mr. Gudkov's remarks had to retract the reports. "They lost Ivan Rybkin
again," the news Web site Lenta.ru reported Monday evening.
Mr. Rybkin's campaign manager, Kseniya Y. Ponomaryova, described assertions
that his disappearance was a hoax as "philistine." She said investigators were
taking his disappearance seriously.
Mr. Berezovksy, who lives in self-exile in London after escaping a Russian
criminal investigation he says is politically motivated, said he last spoke to
Mr. Rybkin, whose presidential campaign he is supporting, on Wednesday
afternoon. He dismissed questions that Mr. Rybkin or others had concocted his
disappearance.
"I am concerned about his fate," he said by telephone from London.
Russia's Central Elections Commission officially registered Mr. Rybkin as a
candidate on Saturday, putting him in a field of six challengers to Mr. Putin,
who is universally expected to win re-election. At the same time, the commission
said Mr. Rybkin faced a criminal investigation about falsification of signatures
required to qualify him for the ballot.
On Monday, the official Russian Information Agency reported that one of Mr.
Rybkin's campaign workers had been arrested in connection with the accusations
of falsifications.
The Kremlin made no comments on Mr. Rybkin on Monday. The main news program
on a state television network, Channel One, cited doubts among investigators
about the circumstances of his disappearance.
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