Russian journalist who angered military falls to death

A senior Russian journalist who embarrassed the country's military establishment with a series of exclusive stories has been found dead outside his apartment in mysterious circumstances. The body of Ivan Safronov, 51-year-old defense correspondent for the newspaper Kommersant, was discovered on Mar. 9. He apparently fell from a fifth-floor window. Safronov's death lacks the grim evidence of assassination that ended the life of Anna Politkovskaya. Doctors said Safronov's corpse showed no signs of violence beside those consistent with a heavy fall. The waist-high windowsill from which he dropped was marked with a footprint, suggesting he had climbed up himself. But Safronov's friends and family cannot believe he lost the will to live. They think he may have been pushed or even fed mind-altering drugs that made him suicidal. In the weeks before his death, the married father-of-two told friends he had uncovered sensitive information about Russian arms sales to the Middle East that could have damaged senior officials, making him a potential target for retribution. Safronov's colleagues at the Kommersant daily newspaper say he was far from suicidal. "We all knew him as a cheerful, contented person who had no reason to end his life," said Sergei Dyupin, a Kommersant reporter who is investigating the death. A former army colonel, Safronov had a reputation for damaging scoops about the military. Shortly before his death, he informed his editors that he planned to file a story on the sale of Iskander surface-to-surface missiles and SU-30 fighters to Syria, and S-300 air defense systems to Iran. He told colleagues he had been warned a security service investigation would follow. Prosecutors are now investigating whether Safronov's death was a "provoked suicide" and confirmed they have ordered a forensic examination to establish whether his body contained "toxic agents." Several witnesses who spoke to Safronov on his mobile phone in the two days before his death have reported that he was behaving uncharacteristically. Dyupin admits the drug theory belongs "among the exotic" but insists there is enough evidence to raise suspicion. "We phoned around the people on the call register of his mobile for the last two days of his life and many of them said he was not his usual self when they talked to him," he said. "He sounded sleepy, depressed or as if he was drugged." A doctor who was treating Safronov for ulcers has confirmed his medicine could not have caused such side effects. An old friend of the reporter, Vyacheslav Davydenko, who called Safronov on the evening before his death, noted that his voice was "strange." "Ivan spoke to me as if with another person," he said. Some members of Moscow's rattled journalistic community have already latched on to the drug theory. An autopsy was carried out before Safronov's burial, with results expected soon. "Very probably poisons or psycho-tropic substances were found in his blood," said Boris Timoshenko, a spokesman for Glasnost Foundation, the press freedom watchdog. There was anger that prosecutors have focused their energies on suicide as the most likely cause of death. "We'd like the investigators not to dwell only on the suicide theory... but to check all the other theories too," Kommersant deputy editor Ilya Bulavinov told reporters. Yet the circumstances of the death remain riddled with inconsistencies. Safronov lived on the third floor of his five-story Khrushchev-era apartment block but fell from the stairwell window a floor and a half above, meaning he either climbed or was forced upstairs. A bag of oranges that he had bought lay spilled in the stairwell, yet there were no signs of a struggle on his body or the window frame. Walking up the stairs, you realize how difficult it would have been to manhandle a bulky ex-soldier over the edge. Also strange is that Safronov dropped from about 43 feet surprisingly low for someone hoping to cause death; be it suicide or murder. Despite the uncertainties, some observers, including Timoshenko, are convinced they know what happened. He said he was "almost certain" that Safranov's investigations into the Russian defense establishment had led to his death. "The methods of killing journalists have changed," he said. "In the past they were shot. Now there are new technologies."