Margarita Simonyan
Russian secret service claims to have prevented attack on RT editor-in-chief
Margarita Simonian is the editor-in-chief of the media company Rossiya Sevodnya.
© IMAGO / SNA
According to the Russian domestic secret service FSB, an attack has been prevented. It was meant for the RT boss Simonyan and the influencer Sobchak. Suspects are said to have been arrested. This information cannot be verified.
According to its own statements, Russia’s domestic secret service FSB has carried out an assassination attempt on the editor-in-chief of the state television station RT, Margarita Simonyan, prevented and arrested several suspects. Accordingly, Russian neo-Nazis wanted to kill Simonian, who is an ardent supporter of Moscow’s war against Ukraine, and also the prominent moderator Xenia Sobchak on behalf of the Kiev secret service SBU. RT published a video in which a young man in a T-shirt with the words “Waffen SS” on it claims that he accepted the assassination order from Ukrainians.
Several attacks on media representatives have already been successful
The 18-year-old man, who gives his name and date of birth, describes the alleged course of events. He was arrested by security forces during the planned handover of weapons, he said.
The FSB repeatedly reports that assassinations have been prevented and that suspects who are said to have planned attacks on behalf of Ukrainian services have been arrested. This cannot be verified by an independent body.
However, two prominent media representatives had already been killed: in August last year Darya Dugina in a car bomb explosion and in early April the military blogger Maxim Fomin, known as Vladlen Tatarsky, when an explosive device was detonated in a café in St. Petersburg. In May there was a car bomb attack on the well-known Kremlin-affiliated writer Zakhar Prilepin, whose driver died – he himself was seriously injured.
Russian secret service FSB is said to have arrested suspects
Simonian, who is also the editor-in-chief of the Rossiya Segodnya agency, thanked the secret service for saving her life. According to the FSB, “members of the neo-Nazi group Paragraph-88” were arrested in Moscow and the Ryazan region. They had scouted out living and working addresses there. A Kalashnikov machine gun and, among other things, 90 cartridges, knives, rubber truncheons, computers and Nazi flags and literature were confiscated from the suspects. The clients are said to have promised 1.5 million rubles (14,800 euros) for each murder.