Soviet Glasnost Journalist Survives Ambush With Guns and Grenade
MOSCOW — A controversial Soviet journalist who defended the army’s crackdown in Lithuania escaped assassination outside Riga early Sunday when his car was riddled with gunfire and blown apart by a grenade, the official Tass news agency said.
Alexander Nevzorov of the Leningrad TV show “600 seconds” and three militiamen were riding in the automobile at about 2 a.m. on the road to Riga, capital of the Latvian republic, when they were ambushed at a railroad crossing stop, Tass said.
“The shooting lasted 10 minutes,” Tass said. “There were no casualties.”
It said that two suspects were detained. Tass said the two were riding in a Soviet-made Zhiguli car, and that the car had a radio transmitter and belonged to the customs department of the Latvian republic.
Tass said that Nevzorov, who said the army’s killing of 14 people in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius on Jan. 13 was a response to gunfire, apparently cheated death by rolling out of the car into a ditch.
Nevzorov, once the darling and epitome of glasnost for his aggressive crime reporting, has been discredited in the eyes of liberals because of his stand on the Vilnius massacre.
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