Kalmykia commemorates journalist Larissa Yudina assassinated 12 years ago

Today in Elista, the capital of Kalmykia, an action was held in memory of Larissa Yudina, a journalist, who perished twelve years ago: friends and colleagues of the former editor-in-chief of the oppositional newspaper "Sovietskaya Kalmykia Today" laid flowers to her tomb.

Let us remind you that Larissa Yudina was killed on June 7, 1998, in Kalmykia. Public activists and human rights defenders believe that the murder was politically motivated, since Larissa published in her paper materials of journalistic investigations, which led to President of Kalmykia Kirsan Ilyumzhinov and his retinue.

"In the pages of her newspaper Larissa Yudina voiced out sharp criticism of President of the republic Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, exposed financial frauds related with the activities of the Agency for Development and Cooperation and Offshore Zone, which was set up at the President of Kalmykia," Vladimir Bessarabov, her former employee and nowadays the editor-in-chief of the oppositional newspaper "Steppe Mosaic", told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent. In his opinion, her murder was an act of revenge.

In November 1999, Yudina's killers - a criminal-recidivist Vladimir Shanukov and former Ilyumzhinov's adviser and security head of the National Bank of Kalmykia Sergey Vaskin, who in Soviet time had worked for law enforcement bodies, were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. The customers and organizers of the murder were never found.