The mystery over the disappearance of a presidential candidate deepened Monday.
Moscow's prosecutor's office announced that it had opened a murder investigation in the case of the candidate, Ivan Rybkin, only to have federal prosecutors overrule them and close the case within an hour, saying there was no evidence yet to suggest foul play in his disappearance.
Rybkin, one of five challengers to President Vladimir Putin in the election on March 14, has not been seen or heard from since Thursday night, the police and campaign advisers said. On Sunday, the police began a search for him, interviewing his wife and others and searching places he was known to frequent.
By Monday night, a spokesman for the Moscow police, Kirill Mazurin, said investigators had made no progress, despite a statement by a member of parliament, Gennady Gudkov, that Rybkin was hiding in a spa outside Moscow. Gudkov's remark proved unfounded, Mazurin said.
Gudkov, a member of the pro-Kremlin party that controls parliament, said in an interview that he had heard "informal reports" about Rybkin's whereabouts, but had no detailed information.
Earlier, he told the Interfax news agency that he believed the patron of Rybkin's party, the businessman and former Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky, had orchestrated Rybkin's disappearance -- apparently to attempt to discredit the presidential elections.
"I am 99 percent certain that this is yet another political stunt organized by Berezovsky," he told Interfax.
Russian and foreign news agencies that reported Rybkin's "discovery" based on Gudkov's remarks had to retract the reports.
"They lost Ivan Rybkin again," the news Web site Lenta.ru reported.
Rybkin's campaign manager, Kseniya Ponomaryova, described assertions that his disappearance was a hoax as "philistine." She said investigators were taking his disappearance seriously.
Berezovsky, who lives in self-exile in London after escaping a Russian criminal investigation he says is politically motivated, said he last spoke to Rybkin, whose presidential campaign he is supporting, last Wednesday afternoon. He, too, dismissed questions that Rybkin or others had concocted his disappearance.
"I am concerned about his fate," Berezovsky said in a telephone interview from London.
Russia's Central Elections Commission officially registered Rybkin as a candidate on Saturday, putting him in a field of six challengers to Putin, who is universally expected to win re-election. At the same time, the commission said that Rybkin faced a criminal investigation for falsifying signatures required to qualify him for the ballot.
On Monday, the official Russian Information Agency reported that one of Rybkin's campaign workers had been arrested in connection with the accusations of falsifications of his petitions.
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
Pulled from the mud as an infant after the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and reunited with his parents following an emotional court battle, the boy once known as “Baby 81” is now a 20-year-old dreaming of higher education. Jayarasa Abilash’s story symbolized that of the families torn apart by one of the worst natural calamities in modern history, but it also offered hope. More than 35,000 people in Sri Lanka were killed, with others missing. The two-month-old was washed away by the tsunami in eastern Sri Lanka and found some distance from home by rescuers. At the hospital, he was
Two US Navy pilots were shot down yesterday over the Red Sea in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, the US military said, marking the most serious incident to threaten troops in over a year of US targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Both pilots were recovered alive after ejecting from their stricken aircraft, with one sustaining minor injuries. However, the shootdown underlines just how dangerous the Red Sea corridor has become over the ongoing attacks on shipping by the Iranian-backed Houthis despite US and European military coalitions patrolling the area. The US military had conducted airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels at the
MILITANTS TARGETED: The US said its forces had killed an IS leader in Deir Ezzor, as it increased its activities in the region following al-Assad’s overthrow Washington is scrapping a long-standing reward for the arrest of Syria’s new leader, a senior US diplomat said on Friday following “positive messages” from a first meeting that included a promise to fight terrorism. Barbara Leaf, Washington’s top diplomat for the Middle East, made the comments after her meeting with Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus — the first formal mission to Syria’s capital by US diplomats since the early days of Syria’s civil war. The lightning offensive that toppled former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8 was led by the Muslim Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is rooted in al-Qaeda’s
RSS