Russian Reporter Beaten, in Coma
MSNBC reports:
MOSCOW — Two unknown men waited for Russian journalist Oleg Kashin to come home and then bludgeoned him on his head, arms and legs. Yet his editor said it was Kashin's mangled hands — with part of one pinky broken off — that showed his attackers wanted to make sure he never wrote again.
Kashin, a 30-year-old reporter for the respected Kommersant newspaper, was hospitalized in a drug-induced coma after the attack early Saturday outside his Moscow apartment.
He is the latest in a line of journalists and activists to be assaulted in Russia. In most cases, the perpetrators are never found, but the Kremlin appeared determined to show that this time things will be different.
President Dmitry Medvedev ordered Russia's prosecutor general and interior minister to oversee the investigation into the attack, and all of Russia's national television networks, which are under direct or indirect Kremlin control, led their programs with the news.
"The criminals should be found and punished," Medvedev wrote in Twitter.
