Crime: Russian ex-policeman admits murder of journalist

20 years after the murder of a Russian investigative journalist in St. Petersburg, a retired Interior Ministry colonel has confessed to the crime. The body of the journalist Maxim Maximov, who was killed in 2004 and worked for the well-known medium Fontanka and an investigative network to expose corruption, was found in a forest near St. Petersburg after a confession by the former police officer Mikhail Smirnov, the Investigative Committee in Moscow said . According to authorities, Smirnov admitted to two other murders.

The investigative committee said Maximov was killed because he had uncovered legal violations in the state security organs. The journalist had reported on uniformed officers being bribed. St. Petersburg was considered one of the worst places for crime in Russia, especially in the 1990s, when Smirnov was active as a police officer and quickly made his career.

“His work is peppered with corpses, beatings and even the urge to put his own people in prison,” wrote the Internet portal Fontanka about Smirnov. Accordingly, the man now wants to volunteer for a front-line deployment in the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. This is how serious criminals repeatedly escape their sentences in Russia.

Representatives of Russian security and power structures are often suspected of accusing journalists who expose grievances of crimes in order to silence them or even kill them. The list of murdered journalists in Russia is long, including names known for their political revelations such as Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova. Many of the crimes have not been fully solved to this day.