Ilyas Shurpayev

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Ilyas Imranovich Shurpayev (Russian: Ильяс Имранович Шурпаев; 25 July 1975 – 21 March 2008) was a Russian television journalist and Channel One correspondent.

Shurpayev was born in Dagestan, graduated local university (his specialization was philology). He had worked in Russia's North Caucasus region including Dagestan and Chechnya.

On 21 March, 2008, Shurpayev was found dead in his apartment in Moscow with stab wounds and a belt around his neck. A fire was set in the apartment after the attack. Hours before his death, Shurpayev wrote a blog saying the owners of a Dagestan newspaper had banned his column and told its staff not to mention his name in publications. Shurpayev wrote with a bit of irony "Now I am a dissident!", it was the title of the last entry in his web log.^[1]

The Investigations Committee of the Russian prosecutor's office has opened a criminal case into the murder of the journalist.^[2]

Shurpayev is one of more than thirty journalists who have been slain in Russia since 2000.^[3] According to Russian sources^[4], in the night he was murdered, he asked the concierge to pass two young men in the doorway saying they were his guests. A week later it was reported^[5] that Shurpayev met them in the park known as a popular place for gay acquaintance. Two Shurpayev's guests who murdered him (and stole a sum of money) were Tajikistani and one of them already served a term for robbery sources^[6]. After committing the crime both young men fled to Tajikistan.

NTV journalist Ilya Zimin was murdered two years before under very similar circumstances. According to official version, he was stabbed to death in his apartment by guest of Moldovan origin who claimed Zimin tried to rape him. The accused man was found innocent by Moldovan court and the request for his transfer to Russian justice was denied. The similarity of two cases and the fact that Zimin's murder investigation ended in nothing caused a lot of guesses that official version of Shurpayev's death is invented to end this case in the same way. Shurpayev's close friend and his brother reported that some officially revealed details of the crime could not be true^[7].

In the evening of the day Shurpayev was found dead, Gaji Abashilov serving as the chief of local Dagestani TV-company was assassinated in Makhachkala^[8].

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