Published on 1 February 2005
22 December 2009 - Opposition journalist killed by being thrown from window, others attacked
11 December 2009 - By blocking further probe, court ensures trial will shed no light on journalist’s murder
10 December 2009 - Government urged to react to increasingly frequent attacks on journalists
Reporters Without Borders today called on the head of the State Agency for Communications, Andrei Titov, to investigate a disinformation campaign in which messages designed to discredit a number of opposition figures were somehow sent on around 8 January from e-mail addresses belonging to the opposition websites Gazeta.kg and Centrasia.ru without the knowledge of those in charge.
"It is essential that the author or authors of these e-mail messages are quickly identified as this kind of disinformation is all the more serious when it comes just a few weeks before parliamentary elections," the press freedom organisation said. The elections are due to take place on 27 February.
The messages were sent from the following addresses: admin@centrasia.ru, info@gazeta.kg, kyrgyzby@narod.ru, indnews@mail.ru and vestnik@ngss.com. One, entitled "A faded rose before blooming," criticised former foreign minister Roza Otunbayeva, who is now one of the opposition leaders. Mambetjunus Abylov, a former minister who is now also an opposition figure, was accused of corruption in another of the messages.
Ulan Melisbeck, the head of the Gazeta.kg site, said the campaign’s aim was to discredit his online newspaper. An article posted on the site on 12 January said Gazeta’s technicians carried out an investigation and discovered that the false messages were sent from Kyrgyzinfo.kg, a site that belongs to the president’s son-in-law, Adil Toigonbayev. Melisbeck said they were drafted by Turat Akimov, a former journalist with the official news agency Kabar who now runs Kyrgyzinfo.kg.
He is the editor of Erk, the last opposition newspaper in Uzbekistan until it was banned by the authorities in 1993, and he was jailed on 18 August 1999 in the wave of repression after the failed assassination attempt on President Islam Karimov in Tashkent on 16 February 1999.
