Attacks on the Press in 2006 - Russia

As Russia assumed a world leadership role, chairing the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations and the Council of Europe's powerful committee of ministers, the Kremlin cracked down on dissent and shrugged off astounding attacks on critics and journalists. In a grim year for the press, parliament passed a measure to hush media criticism by calling it "extremism," and an assassin silenced Anna Politkovskaya, the internationally known reporter who exposed government abuses in Chechnya.

On the eve of the G8 summit in St. Petersburg in July, parliament passed a bill broadening the definition of extremism to include media criticism of public officials. President Vladimir Putin soon signed the measure over the objections of media and human rights groups. CPJ likened the measure – which said extremist activity includes "public slander directed toward figures fulfilling the state duties of the Russian Federation" – to the catchall laws used in Soviet times to prosecute critics. The crackdown on dissent had begun in January when Putin signed a measure restricting the activities of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The law gave the Justice Ministry vast authority to shutter organizations for engaging in activities that run counter to the "political independence of the Russian Federation." Ten months later, authorities used the broadly worded law to close the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, a human rights center and publisher.

Politkovskaya, 48, had survived dozens of assignments in conflict-ravaged Chechnya, but she did not survive a trip to a Moscow grocery store. She was killed in her apartment building on October 7, the 13th journalist to be slain, contract style, in Putin's Russia. All of the cases remained unsolved, a record of impunity that helped make Russia the third deadliest country in the world for journalists, CPJ found in a 2006 special report, "Deadly News."

Politkovskaya, special correspondent for Moscow's independent Novaya Gazeta, was regarded as one of the most knowledgeable experts on the war in Chechnya – a conflict greatly underreported in Russian media. For seven years, Politkovskaya endured threats, imprisonment, forced exile, and poisoning to chronicle the plight of Chechen civilians at the hands of federal troops, rebel forces, and the Kremlin-backed Chechen militia. In her reporting, Politkovskaya exposed human rights abuses, disappearances, corruption, torture, and murder. She sharply criticized Kremlin-backed Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov in her writing and in numerous interviews with international media.

Security cameras at Politkovskaya's apartment building and market caught a blurred image of her killer, a man in a dark baseball cap. At around 4 p.m., according to news reports and CPJ interviews, he followed her home and watched her unload several bags of groceries from her sedan. As she emerged from her elevator to retrieve the rest, the assassin shot her in the chest and head with a 9mm handgun fitted with a silencer. He dropped the pistol, its serial number erased, next to her body and strolled away. A neighbor discovered the body about a half hour later; investigators retrieved four bullets.

Within days, Novaya Gazeta received hundreds of letters from Politkovskaya's readers, sources, colleagues, and supporters. "She was our voice, our pen, and Russia's conscience. Left without her, where do we go?" asked one reader from Chechnya.

Politkovskaya's last report, unpublished at the time of her death, said Chechen law enforcement officials had tortured young Chechen men into confessing to crimes they never committed. "When prosecutors and courts work not to punish the guilty but on political commission and with the only goal of pleasing the Kremlin with accounts of combating terrorism, criminal cases are popping like cakes from an oven," Politkovskaya wrote.

At a press conference in Germany three days after the assassination, Putin downplayed the killing by saying that Politkovskaya had "insignificant" impact in Russia. He brushed off the possibility of any official involvement in the killing, suggesting instead that it was the product of an overseas conspiracy designed to undermine the Kremlin. He cited "solid evidence" that these unnamed conspirators planned to "sacrifice someone to create a wave of anti-Russian sentiment internationally."

Conspiracy theories abounded a month later when former Russian spy Aleksandr Litvinenko died in London, a victim of an extraordinary case of radiation poisoning. Litvinenko had been investigating Politkovskaya's murder when he was somehow poisoned by a rare substance known as polonium 210. From his own deathbed, Litvinenko's family said, he dictated a statement that accused the Kremlin of ordering the poisoning. Meeting with European Union leaders in Helsinki, Putin called the ex-spy's death a tragedy but lamented that it was being used for "political provocation."

Politkovskaya was herself poisoned en route to the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis, putting her in the hospital and preventing her from covering the deadly siege.

Under Putin, the Kremlin has restricted domestic and international reporting from Chechnya, imposing travel and content restrictions and harassing reporters. From the onset of the war in 1999, the Media Ministry banned Russian television networks from broadcasting interviews with Chechen rebel leaders. Journalists such as Yuri Bagrov, a correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, have been stripped of press credentials in retaliation for their reporting. A 2005 CPJ special report, "Rebels and Reporters," cited more than 60 instances of government harassment, obstruction, and legal action against journalists in Chechnya.

The government's aggressive tactics continued in 2006. A court in Nizhny Novgorod convicted Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, director of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society and editor of its newspaper, Pravo-Zashchita (Rights Protection), on charges of "inciting ethnic hatred by using the mass media." The February conviction stemmed from publication of two statements by Chechen rebel leaders calling for peace talks, which appeared in the March and April 2004 editions of Pravo-Zashchita. Dmitriyevsky was sentenced to probation, but authorities used the conviction and the new NGO law as basis for closing the society in October.

Chechnya remained an extraordinarily dangerous place. In August, the Russian human rights group Memorial reported 125 abductions in just seven months. That month, masked men seized Elina Ersenoyeva, correspondent for the independent weekly Chechenskoye Obshchestvo, in Chechnya's capital, Grozny. Ersenoyeva reported on social issues, refugees, and, most recently, conditions in Grozny prisons, her editor, Timur Aliyev, told CPJ. Following the kidnapping, reports emerged that Ersenoyeva had been secretly, and some said forcibly, married to the notorious Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev. The separatist leader, who had claimed responsibility for hostage crises in Moscow and Beslan in which hundreds died, had been killed in an explosion in the republic of Ingushetia in July. Ersenoyeva's status was not clear in late year.

Authorities reported no headway in solving the July 2003 abduction of Agence France-Presse correspondent Ali Astamirov in Ingushetia. Astamirov had endured months of police and security service harassment in retaliation for his reporting in Chechnya.

Deadly violence, investigative ineptitude, and judicial indifference remained sad hallmarks in Russian press cases; a second reporter was also killed in retaliation for his work. Vagif Kochetkov, 31, a reporter in the city of Tula, 125 miles (200 kilometers) south of Moscow, died at a local hospital on January 8 from head injuries suffered in an attack two weeks earlier. Kochetkov, a correspondent for the Moscow daily Trud and columnist for the local newspaper Tulsky Molodoi Kommunar, had written about drug trafficking and aggressive practices in the pharmaceutical industry. Colleagues said he received telephone threats prior to the attack, the Web site Newsinfo reported.

CPJ sources said a bag believed to contain Kochetkov's passport, press card, credit card, and work-related documents were taken in the assault; his money and fur coat were not. Yet authorities did not focus on Kochetkov's work, labeling the case a street robbery and bringing a local man, Yan Stakhanov, to trial on manslaughter charges. The trial was pending in late year.

CPJ continued to investigate the murders of two other journalists to determine whether the killings were work related. Ilya Zimin, correspondent for the national NTV network, was found beaten to death in his Moscow apartment on February 27. Yevgeny Gerasimenko, reporter for the weekly Saratovsky Rasklad, was found dead on July 26 in his apartment in the southeastern city of Saratov, a plastic bag over his head and multiple bruises on his body.

Prosecutors reported no developments in the disappearance of Maksim Maksimov, a 41-year-old investigative reporter for the St. Petersburg weekly Gorod, who was last seen on June 29, 2004, when he went to meet with a source in the city's downtown district. Maksimov's mother, Rimma Maksimova, told CPJ she was losing hope of learning what happened to her son.

Maksimov had reported on corruption in the St. Petersburg branch of the Interior Ministry and had investigated the killings of several prominent businessmen and politicians, including Galina Starovoitova, a parliamentary deputy shot in her apartment building in 1998, according to press reports and CPJ sources.

Even in high-profile cases such as the 2004 assassination of Paul Klebnikov, the American editor of Forbes Russia, the Russian justice system produced no immediate results. Two ethnic Chechens were tried in secret but acquitted in May amid allegations of jury intimidation and procedural violations. Court officials said the introduction of classified evidence required closing the trial to the public, rebuffing pleas by Klebnikov's family and CPJ to close only those portions in which confidential information was to be reviewed. For four months following the verdict, Moscow City Court officials impeded the Klebnikov family's appeal by failing to provide them with a trial transcript.

But in November, the Russian Supreme Court tossed out the acquittals and ordered that Kazbek Dukuzov and Musa Vakhayev be retried. CPJ called on authorities to open the new trial to the public. In a statement, the Klebnikovs called the ruling a "hopeful sign" and reiterated their desire that authorities fully investigate those who ordered the killing.

The prosecutor general's office said the killing was ordered by Chechen separatist leader Khozh Akhmed Nukhayev, the subject of a critical 2003 book by Klebnikov, but it has not provided any evidence to support that assertion. Nukhayev's whereabouts were unknown, although some Chechen experts said he died in the mountains of Dagestan in the months before Klebnikov's murder.

Another unsolved case hit a roadblock. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in October that it could not take up an appeal filed by the parents of reporter Dmitry Kholodov, who was blown up by a booby-trapped briefcase in his office on October 17, 1994. The Strasbourg court said it did not have jurisdiction in the case because Russia did not ratify the European Convention on Human Rights until four years after Kholodov's murder.

The ruling was a blow to Zoya and Yuri Kholodov's 12-year effort to gain justice in their son's killing. Kholodov, 27, a reporter for Moskovsky Komsomolets, had exposed high-level corruption in the Russian military. Six defendants, four of them military intelligence officers, were acquitted by Russian military courts in 2002 and 2004 of organizing and carrying out the assassination.

In addition to physical attacks, critical journalists throughout Russia endured legal and bureaucratic harassment in retaliation for their work. Vladimir Rakhmankov, editor of the Web site Kursiv in the central city of Ivanovo, was convicted of insulting the president in a May article headlined "Putin as Russia's Phallic Symbol." The story satirized Putin's goal to boost the country's birth rate, making a tongue-in-cheek reference to an increase in births among some species at the local zoo. Rakhmankov declared that the animals "immediately responded to the president's appeal." Authorities were not amused; investigators raided Kursiv's newsroom, seized the paper's computers, sealed the premises, searched Rakhmankov's apartment, and confiscated his personal computer. Rakhmankov was fined 20,000 rubles (US$760), and his Web site went dark.

In August, a court in the western city of Kaliningrad ordered the opposition weekly Novye Kolyosa closed at the request of the federal media regulator Rosokhrankultura. The regulator claimed that the paper had disclosed secrets of a criminal investigation in a May 2005 series about the murder of a local businessman. Prosecutors also opened 16 criminal cases against Novye Kolyosa's founder, Igor Rudnikov, and journalists Oleg Berezovsky, Aleksandr Berezovsky, and Dina Yakshina in response to the weekly's critical reporting.

Authorities in Perm launched an intensive campaign of harassment against Permsky Obozrevatel, the city's only independent newspaper. The business weekly regularly featured critical coverage of the local administration and analytical articles on corruption, privatization, and the redistribution of municipal property. Police raided the paper twice, once in May and again in August, confiscating servers, computers, disks, flash memory cards, staff records, and photographs. In August, all eight staffers were placed under criminal investigation for "insult," "violating the right to private life," and "disclosing state secrets." In September, police arrested photographer Vladimir Korolyov on suspicion of disclosing state secrets. Authorities did not elaborate on the accusation.

Over the past five years, companies with close ties to the Kremlin have purchased several prominent independent broadcast and print outlets. The trend continued in September when the metals magnate Alisher Usmanov, a Kremlin ally, purchased Kommersant. The business daily had earned a reputation for analytical journalism often critical of the Kremlin. Usmanov told Kommersant journalists he would not interfere with editorial policy. But such acquisitions, along with the Kremlin's tight control of national television, were widely seen as an effort to steer media coverage in advance of the 2008 presidential election.

The Central Election Commission in September rejected a call for a constitutional referendum that would have allowed Putin to run for a third term. The next month, Putin told a televised news conference that he would indeed not seek another term, but that he would remain involved in politics.

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Killed in 2006 in Russia

Vagif Kochetkov, Trud and Tulsky Molodoi Kommunar, January 8, 2006, Tula

Kochetkov, 31, a reporter in Tula, 125 miles (200 kilometers) south of Moscow, died in the Tula city hospital after undergoing surgery for a serious head injury he sustained in an attack two weeks before, according to CPJ interviews and local press reports.

Kochetkov was Tula correspondent for the Moscow daily Trud and a columnist for the local newspaper Tulsky Molodoi Kommunar, reporting on politics, social issues, and culture.

At least one assailant struck Kochetkov on the head with a blunt object and robbed him of a bag and cell phone as he approached his home in Tula on the evening of December 27, 2005, sources told CPJ. The bag was believed to have contained Kochetkov's passport, press card, credit card, and work-related documents. The attackers did not take Kochetkov's money or an expensive fur coat he was wearing. When a neighbor found Kochetkov's bag in her apartment building's basement, the bag contained everything but the documents related to Kochetkov's work, according to CPJ interviews with Kochetkov's parents, Valentina and Yuri, and Lena Shuletova, a friend and colleague.

On the night of the attack, the news agency ANN reported, Kochetkov told his parents he was meeting an unidentified person, after which he would return home to download his work onto his computer. That evening, Valentina and Yuri Kochetkov told CPJ, the journalist called from a local coffee shop and told them that he'd be home in an hour. On the way, he was attacked.

Two neighbors found Kochetkov lying unconscious on the ground at around 2 a.m. on December 28. After regaining consciousness, Kochetkov walked home with the help of neighbors. He did not seek immediate medical attention or report the attack to the police.

Kochetkov was not admitted to the hospital until the next day, when doctors diagnosed him with two hematomas and said his condition was not life-threatening, Yuri Kochetkov told CPJ. Kochetkov's health began deteriorating January 1. He underwent brain surgery on January 5 and fell into a coma and died three days later. An autopsy showed Kochetkov had suffered a skull fracture, a concussion, multiple chest bruises, and other head injuries, according to press reports and CPJ interviews. Kochetkov never identified his attackers.

The Kochetkovs reported the attack on January 7, and police opened a criminal investigation, the parents told CPJ. By January 9, police said that they had identified a suspect.

On April 3, Tula prosecutors announced they had completed their investigation and determined Kochetkov's death to be the result of a robbery. That same day, prosecutors filed robbery and manslaughter charges against Yan Stakhanov, a 26-year-old Tula businessman.

Police did not focus on Kochetkov's work as a motive. Investigators did not question colleagues about Kochetkov's recent assignments, nor did they look at the reporter's computer or notebooks for leads. CPJ research shows that Kochetkov had worked on sensitive issues prior to his murder.

Just prior to the attack, Kochetkov wrote an article in Trud on the activities of a Tula drug-dealing group. The December 16 article was headlined, "Revenge of the Mafia?" In June 2005, Kochetkov criticized the aggressive business practices of a local pharmaceutical company in another article.

Journalists at Tulsky Molodoi Kommunar said in late March that Kochetkov had received telephone threats in retaliation for his reporting, the Moscow-based news Web site Newsinfo said. Kochetkov's colleagues believed that he had enemies, but they said he never shared personal information, the Moscow-based news Web site Press-Attache said.

The trial of Stakhanov opened on April 17 in the Proletarski district court in Tula. Although the trial was said to be open, only one journalist at a time was admitted to the hearings. Officials cited lack of space in the courtroom, Valentina and Yuri Kochetkov told CPJ. Before the trial, Stakhanov allegedly confessed to killing Kochetkov but said later that the confession was coerced, local press reports said. During the trial, prosecutors said the assault on Kochetkov was part of a string of robberies in Tula, according to local press reports. The trial was recessed in September without an immediate date to reconvene, colleague Shuletova said.

Yuri Kochetkov told CPJ that he doubted the attack on his son was a robbery, since only work-related documents and a cell phone were taken.

Anna Politkovskaya, Novaya Gazeta, October 7, 2006, Moscow

Politkovskaya, 48, a journalist renowned for her critical coverage of the Chechen conflict, was found slain in her apartment building in Moscow, according to international news reports. The Interfax news agency, citing police, said Politkovskaya had been shot and that a pistol and four bullet casings had been found.

Politkovskaya, special correspondent for the independent Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was well known for her investigative reports on human rights abuses by the Russian military in Chechnya. In seven years covering the second Chechen war, Politkovskaya's reporting repeatedly drew the wrath of Russian authorities. She was threatened, jailed, forced into exile, and poisoned during her career, CPJ research shows.

Igor Korolkov, a colleague, told the Regnum news Web site that Politkovskaya had been reporting on alleged torture in Chechnya for a coming story.

CPJ had named Politkovskaya one of the world's top press freedom figures of the past 25 years in the fall 2006 edition of its magazine, Dangerous Assignments. In an interview for that profile, Politkovskaya noted the government's obstruction and harassment of journalists trying to cover the Chechen conflict and pointed to the deadly 2004 hostage crisis in the North Ossetian town of Beslan. "There is so much more to write about Beslan," she told CPJ, "but it gets more and more difficult when all the journalists who write are forced to leave."

Politkovskaya was poisoned on her way to cover the Beslan crisis. After drinking tea on a flight to the region, she became seriously ill and was hospitalized – but the toxin was never identified because the medical staff was instructed to destroy her blood tests.

Politkovskaya had been threatened and attacked numerous times in retaliation for her work. In February 2001, CPJ research shows, security agents detained her in the Vedeno district in Chechnya, accusing her of entering Chechnya without accreditation. She was kept in a pit for three days without food or water, while a military officer threatened to shoot her. Seven months later, she received death threats from a military officer accused of crimes against civilians. She was forced to flee to Vienna after the officer sent an e-mail to Novaya Gazeta promising that he would seek revenge.

When Politkovskaya covertly visited Chechnya in 2002 to investigate new allegations of human rights abuses, CPJ research shows, security officers arrested her, kept her overnight at a military base, and threatened her. In October of that year, Politkovskaya served as a mediator between armed Chechen fighters and Russian forces during a hostage standoff in a central Moscow theater. Two days into the crisis, with the Kremlin restricting media coverage, Russian forces gassed the theater and 129 hostages died. Politkovskaya delivered some of the most compelling accounts of the tragedy.

Maksim Maksimov, Gorod, November 30, 2006, St. Petersburg

Maksimov, 41, an investigative reporter for the St. Petersburg weekly magazine Gorod, was declared dead by the Dzerzhinsky District Court in St. Petersburg on November 30, 2006, more than two years after he had been reported missing.

Maksimov was last seen on June 29, 2004, when he went to meet with a source in the city's downtown district, the business daily Kommersant reported. A month later, police found his car parked near a local hotel. Maksimov's mobile phone without its SIM card resurfaced at a local flea market at about the same time, according to local press reports.

Investigators and colleagues did not initially focus on Maksimov's journalism as a reason for his disappearance. At the time, Maksimov was seeking to trade his apartment in downtown St. Petersburg for a bigger one. Colleagues believed that he might have fallen victim to the organized crime gangs that control the real estate market in St. Petersburg, the news Web site Gazeta reported.

For an entire year after the disappearance, police and prosecutors did not report any developments in the investigation. In June 2005, several Russian newspapers reported on the detention of at least three police officers – all senior investigators in the corruption division of the Northwestern Federal District's Interior Ministry. The three were said to be suspects in Maksimov's disappearance and suspected murder.

The initial report came from the news agency Interfax and cited an anonymous source in the Northwestern Federal District's Prosecutor-General's Office. The report said that investigators believed that Maksimov was murdered for his work as a journalist and that two majors and a lieutenant colonel were considered suspects.

The suspects, Kommersant said, were held on unrelated criminal charges of forgery and falsifying evidence. The English-language daily Moscow Times said that St. Petersburg police confirmed the Interfax report but refused to give further details.

Soon after those reports appeared, however, on June 30, 2005, the Northwestern Federal District's Interior Ministry issued a statement denying the involvement of the three police investigators in Maksimov's disappearance. The Interior Ministry said it "considers inadmissible and premature the appearance of press reports, accusing [the officers] of masterminding the murder of journalist Maksim Maksimov." The Interior Ministry gave no information on how the investigation was developing. The statement generated no follow-up by the authorities.

In the absence of official information, speculation about what could have happened to Maksimov continued to circulate in the Russian press.

The St. Petersburg newspaper Smena, where Maksimov worked before joining Gorod, said on June 27, 2005, that it learned from unnamed sources in the St. Petersburg branch of the Interior Ministry that Maksimov disappeared was targeted by high-ranking officers in retaliation for the journalist's investigation of corruption in the local Interior Ministry. The paper said that the perpetrators, three masterminds and two executors, were in detention.

Kommersant carried a similar story the next day. The paper said investigators believed Maksimov was strangled to death to prevent him from reporting on corruption in the St. Petersburg branch of the Interior Ministry. Several newspapers described in detail what they said happened to Maksimov the day he disappeared, and how he had been killed, but they did not attribute their accounts or explain how they had received the information.

Other reports noted that Maksimov had investigated the murders of several Russian businessmen and politicians, including Galina Starovoytova, a parliamentary deputy shot in her apartment building in 1998.

Authorities have not disclosed further information on the investigation, the identities of anyone held in connection with the crime, or the status of any criminal case. The journalist's body has not been found.

Rimma Maksimova, Maksim Maksimov's mother, described her communication with prosecutors in charge of the investigation as "difficult." Maksimova told CPJ that she had received no answer to queries she sent to the Northwestern Federal District's prosecutor-general's office and the Northwestern Federal District's Interior Ministry in St. Petersburg.

On November 24, 2006, Maksimova met with St. Petersburg Gov. Valentina Matvienko who assured her that solving Maksimov's case was a priority for St. Petersburg's administration. But the meeting did not result in any developments, and Maksimova told CPJ that authorities stopped answering her queries.

Ilya Zimin, NTV, February 26, 2006, Moscow (motive unconfirmed)

Zimin, 33, a correspondent for the national television station NTV, was found murdered in his Moscow apartment. Colleagues went to Zimin's home on February 27 after the reporter failed to show up for work or answer his phone, according to local press reports. They found his heavily beaten corpse lying face down in a pool of blood and much of the furniture overturned in what appeared to be a sign of a violent struggle, according to local and international press reports.

Medical experts determined that Zimin probably died around 3 p.m. the day before, February 26, as a result of head trauma. The Moscow city prosecutor opened a murder investigation. A laptop computer and cell phone were stolen from the apartment, and a bloody fingerprint belonging to someone other than the victim was found on a light switch, local news outlets reported.

Authorities said the killing was probably not related to Zimin's work at NTV. Prosecutor Anatoly Zuyev said the murder was most likely a common crime resulting from an argument. He said there was no sign of forced entry, suggesting that Zimin knew his assailant, according to press reports.

NTV News Editor Tatyana Mitkova said she did not rule out the possibility that the murder was linked to Zimin's work for the station, the news Web site Polit reported. Zimin worked as a correspondent for NTV's investigative program "Profession: Reporter." Colleague Vadim Takmenev said Zimin had recently used hidden cameras to prepare an exposé of health violations at expensive Moscow restaurants, Polit reported.

Authorities did not immediately identify a suspect, according to the Moscow daily Kommersant. A concierge at Zimin's apartment building initially reported that three men with police identifications visited the reporter at 10 a.m. on February 26 and left an hour later, but authorities said they determined the three had visited another apartment in the building, according to Kommersant.

Zimin was assaulted, robbed, and hospitalized with a broken leg in April 2005, but he did not link the attack to his work, the Moscow daily Novoye Izvestiya reported. Born in the far eastern city of Vladivostok, he had worked as a local correspondent for state television GTRK and NTV before moving to Moscow in 2000.

Yevgeny Gerasimenko, Saratovsky Rasklad, July 26, 2006, Saratov (motive unconfirmed)

Gerasimenko, a correspondent for the independent weekly Saratovsky Rasklad, was found dead in his apartment in Saratov in southeastern Russia, according to local press reports. Saratov Department of Interior spokesman Denis Zheltov said forensic evidence indicated that Gerasimenko had been killed around 1 a.m., the local television channel GTRK Saratov reported.

Gerasimenko's mother found the journalist with a plastic bag over his head and multiple bruises on his body. Police found no signs of forced entry, but Gerasimenko's computer was missing, local reports said. Gerasimenko had been investigating the corporate takeover of a local commercial enterprise, Saratovsky Rasklad Editor-in-Chief Vladimir Spiryagin told the United Volga news Web site.

In November, a regional court in Saratov convicted a local man, Sergei Finogeyev, in the killing and sentenced him to 18 years in prison. In a statement, the prosecutor's office said the slaying occurred during a robbery.