Streletsky: Klebnikov Book Was on Listyev
By Catherine Belton Staff Writer Paul Klebnikov, the American journalist who was shot dead in Moscow, was starting to work on a new investigation into the 1995 murder of television director Vladimir Listyev, an event he earlier linked to Boris Berezovsky in a controversial article for Forbes magazine, his Russian publisher said Thursday.
"He was beginning to collect material about Listyev's killing," said Valery Streletsky, the publisher, who previously served as a deputy to President Boris Yeltsin's chief bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov, a longtime Berezovsky foe. "Only a very small circle of people knew about this."
Klebnikov, a senior editor at Forbes who this year launched the magazine's Russian-language edition as its editor, became well-known for his investigative reports on the shadowy intersection between business, politics and crime with his 1996 profile in Forbes magazine on Berezovsky, the former Kremlin kingmaker now in exile in London.
The article, which immediately raised Berezovsky's ire, called him "a powerful gangland boss" and accused him of being behind the killing of Listyev, a well-respected former talk show host whose new job as general director of the ORT television network ended abruptly with his murder shortly after the channel was privatized.
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Berezovsky said he was at a loss to say who might have been behind Klebnikov's killing. But he called him "a dishonest journalist" whose way of working could have easily made him enemies. "Somebody clearly did not like the way he operated and decided to sort it out with him, Russian-style, not through the English courts like I did," he said.
He was unavailable for further comment late Thursday.
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Streletsky, who said he last spoke to Klebnikov early last week, said Berezovsky's comments were "total lies" and called him "a sick person."
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/07/16/010.html
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