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January 12, 2010
Did Oleg Deripaska Really Order the Murder of a Journalist?
Robert Amsterdam
Though it has taken a couple of weeks, the news of the attempted hit on Helmer and new allegations that Rusal and Oleg Deripaska were behind it, have gone viral. On Jan. 9th, the Australian (where Helmer is originally from) published a new angle, which indicated that the attack was averted only because the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs shared intel with the journalist that the hit was coming his way. The Australian article got picked up by Dave D'Alessandro of the Star-Ledger over the weekend (who probably has interest in the news as related to NJ Nets buyer Mikhail Prokhorov), and since then the it has been picked up by the highly visible political blogger Matt Taibi, an old friend of Helmer.
...Here's why the story is still so weird. So if nobody knows who controls Rusal at this point, or if the company is actually under the executive stewardship of the Kremlin at this point, than how can we be so sure that they were the ones behind this bumbling assassination job? Why wouldn't such a wealthy business group have paid off the federal security service and local police with bribes like they did in the Politkovskaya job? There seemed to be a suspiciously high level of evidence available to pin this on the company ... I mean seriously, who goes out to do something like that and carries a dossier with the company's name on it?? Furthermore, could the timing have been any worse?
Something just doesn't quite add up here, and perhaps it is just the fact that we have gotten so used to murdered journalists in Russia, that this one foiled attempt didn't even make the headlines for several weeks.
Posted by eric at January 12, 2010 8:58 PM