A U.S.-based media rights watchdog on Wednesday urged Russian prosecutors to investigate an attack that broke the skull of a journalist in Sochi, where Russia will host the 2014 Winter Olympics.
Russia is ranked one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists and cases involving violence against them are rarely solved. Despite calls from Western governments and rights groups, the killers of Kremlin critic Anna Politkovksaya and the former editor of Forbes Russia, Paul Klebnikov, are still at large.
On Monday, two unidentified men attacked 62-year-old Arkady Lander, the editor of Sochi's independent Mestnaya newspaper, with metal rods as he returned home with groceries, news site Caucasian Knot reported.
"Witnesses and the editor himself can identify the attackers," said Nina Ognianova, Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
"We call on the officials responsible to prevent impunity from prevailing in yet another case of a physical attack on a Russian journalist," Ognianova said in a statement.
The spokeswoman of the local Prosecutor's Office in Sochi, a city on the country's Black Sea coast with a population of 400,000, said she was not aware of the incident and requested questions to be submitted in writing by fax on Thursday.
Neighbors had seen the attackers in the building in the days leading up to the incident, the news site reported. It said Lander's head was bludgeoned with the rods, but he was not robbed and nothing was taken from his home.
Mestnaya, a free paper with a circulation of 50,000, has written critical articles accusing authorities of rigging local elections.
"The reporter [Lander] is in the hospital with fractures of the skull, a brain concussion and lacerations on his head," Radio Free Europe reported on its web site.
CPJ says 19 journalists have been murdered for their work since 2000 in Russia. Last year, four reporters were killed in Russia, the fifth most dangerous country for reporters after the Philippines, Somalia, Pakistan and Iraq. according to the CPJ.