MOSCOW - Russia's best-known campaigning
newspaper asked the police on Monday to investigate after
unknown individuals left nine caged sheep outside its Moscow
office, some of them dressed in jackets with the word 'PRESS'
and the paper's name on them.
Novaya Gazeta is well-known in Russia for its investigations
into official corruption, its reporting on Chechnya, criticism
of the authorities and its coverage of the opposition, in a
media landscape where most newspapers are loyal to the Kremlin.
Six of its journalists, including investigative reporter
Anna Politkovskaya, have been murdered since 2000, and earlier
this month somebody sent a funeral wreath and a severed sheep's
head to the newspaper's office with a note calling one of its
reporters, Denis Korotkov, "a traitor to the motherland".
Korotkov has written extensively about the activities of
Russian military contractors and Moscow's military campaign in
Syria in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Nadezhda Prusenkova, a spokeswoman for Novaya Gazeta, said
security guards had spotted unknown individuals swiftly
unloading the sheep from a truck on Monday afternoon before
driving away.
She and her colleagues came out to find three black cages,
each with three sheep inside.
Prusenkova called the incident unpleasant and said it was
probably linked to earlier packages left at the paper's offices,
which she said had come with threatening notes.
"We see this as a pretty unfunny joke, as someone trolling
us," said Prusenkova. "We don't joke about these things. We take
issues of safety (of our journalists) very seriously.
"We live in a pretty toxic environment where there are
always people who are not happy with what we're doing and how
we're doing it."