Attacked Deputy Calls for Police Action

Two men attacked the apartment of a member of the State Duma who killed an alleged extortionist last month, the deputy, Sergei Skorochkin, said Monday.Skorochkin, a member of the new Liberal Democratic Union of the December 12 reformist parliamentary faction, told a press conference that the incident occurred at his apartment in Zaraisk, 164 kilometers southeast of Moscow, last Thursday night. "I called police three times after someone started to break down the entrance door of my apartment and the police unit only arrived after the third call and detained three attackers," Skorochkin said, identifying them as B.B. Borisov, A.A. Maslov and V.L. Goryunov. He said one suspect was arrested in a getaway car.The court in Zaryask just fined the attackers 14,000 rubles (about $ 7), but he said he was insisting on further investigation of the incident."I see a direct connection between the first incident which happened to me last month and the second," he said. Previously Skorochkin had reported that on May 1 he shot to death in self-defense a man with a Kalashnikov automatic rifle who sought protection money."Both investigations are going very slowly which means that police have practically acknowledged their own inability to protect a deputy," he said. "What shall ordinary people do who do not have the so-called immunity of a deputy?"Skorochkin said Monday that he has been paying racketeers protection money since starting in business in 1990 and continued until he left his alcohol-production business when he was elected to the Duma. Last August, he said, he had lost all patience and appealed to police, adding he had to pay 30 million rubles (more than $15,000) last year. "Since the time I appealed to police nothing has changed and police failed to organize my protection," he said. "Police did not detain the racketeers and my family and I receive phone threats regularly."Alexander Traspov, a deputy of the Liberal Democratic Union of December 12, said at the same press conference that Skorochkin has been moving from one hotel to another since Thursday's attack and that Skorochkin's family has left the Moscow region.From the beginning of the year there have been a series of assaults on legislators. A group of criminals threw a Molotov cocktail into the flat of deputy Yury Ten in the Siberian city of Irkutsk in March. An unidentified gunman killed Andrei Aizderdzis, a deputy and former banker, on April 26. A deputy of the Moscow City Duma, Nikolai Moskovchenko, was seriously wounded by an unidentified attacker June 1.