Liberal leader assassinated

last updated 8 January 2015

Moscow

Sergei Yushenkov, an outspoken Russian lawmaker who often criticized President Vladimir Putin, was gunned down outside his Moscow home this week by an unknown assailant. Yushenkov was one of three co-founders of Liberal Russia, a political party backed by Boris Berezovsky, a prominent Putin opponent who lives in self-imposed exile in London. Another co-founder, Vladimir Golovlyov, was mysteriously murdered last summer. “We live in a country where ignoble actions go unpunished,” said Liberal Russia’s only remaining living founder, Viktor Pokhmelkin. Yushenkov had been trying to prove that a 1999 series of Moscow apartment bombings, blamed on Chechens and used as a pretext for the war in Chechnya, was actually the work of the Russian secret police.