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Itar-Tass
Grigory Yavlinsky laying flowers during a memorial service for Yury Shchekochikhin at the Central Clinical Hospital on Saturday.
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Hundreds of people gathered Saturday to pay tribute to investigative journalist
and State Duma Deputy Yury
Shchekochikhin and urge the authorities to find out the cause of his
death.
The results of an autopsy Friday, however, will only be known in 10
days to a month, said Yevgenia Dillendorf, a spokeswoman for the liberal
Yabloko party, of which Shchekochikhin was a member.
Shchekochikhin, 53, died Wednesday night after suffering a serious allergic
reaction, and many of his colleagues in the Duma and at his newspaper,
Novaya Gazeta, have expressed fears of foul play.
Dillendorf said Friday that the autopsy will show whether Shchekochikhin
was poisoned. She said he had suffered a rash that appeared to have ended
up fatally damaging his internal organs.
She said several laboratories were poring over the autopsy.
The Central Clinical Hospital, where Shchekochikhin was hospitalized
for nine days before his death, declined to comment Friday.
Prominent figures including former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev,
Yabloko head Grigory Yavlinsky
and Union of Right Forces leader Boris Nemtsov attended a memorial service
for Shchekochikhin at the hospital Saturday.
"This is a loss not only for his relatives but for the whole country
because civil society is based upon people like this," Gorbachev
said.
Yabloko Deputy Vladimir Lukin
opened the memorial service by offering condolences to Shchekochikhin's
wife and two sons. He ended his speech with an appeal to the authorities
to come up with "a clear, precise and full answer" to questions
about the cause of the death.
Retired police General Alexander Gurov -- who in the 1980s served as
a primary source for Shchekochikhin's unprecedented exposes of corruption
in the Soviet ranks -- also expressed bewilderment about the death.
"His condition suddenly worsened, and too many questions have been
left unanswered after his death," Gurov, who heads the Duma's security
committee, told Gazeta.ru.
In Soviet times, Gurov worked as chief of the Interior Ministry's anti-organized
crime department and helped Shchekochikhin investigate corruption and
abuse of power in the nomenclature for a series of groundbreaking articles.
Shchekochikhin had many enemies and received numerous threats due to
his investigative reporting, Dillendorf said.
Last year, the Federal Guard Service provided Shchekochikhin's younger
son, a medical student, with a bodyguard, apparently in connection to
a threat over a series of articles on the high-profile Tri Kita tax evasion
investigation.
Shchekochikhin, who suffered a slight stroke in April, first felt ill
June 17 during a trip to Ryazan on an assignment for Novaya Gazeta, Novaya
Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov was quoted by Kommersant as saying in its
Friday issue.
When he returned to Moscow, his condition continued to worsen and he
was hospitalized, Muratov said.
Central Clinical Hospital doctors were unable to diagnose Shchekochikhin's
condition, and the patient slipped into a coma five days before his death.
He never recovered consciousness.
Shchekochikhin served as deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta from 1997 and
as a Duma deputy from 1995.
In accordance with his wishes, he was buried Saturday at the so-called
writers' cemetery in the village of Peredelkino, in the Moscow region.
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