Ekho Moskvy, however, said Grits was not acquainted with Felganhauer. He reportedly had a floor plan of the office with English notations.
St. Petersburg-based Channel 5 aired a police interrogation with Grits in which he says, “I’ve only known the victim telepathically for 5 years.”
“I was motivated by the fact that she has been sexually harassing me for 2 months. Every night, using telepathic means of contact, she entered and sexually harassed me,” he added in the interrogation.
Earlier, the pro-Kremlin Channel 5 reported that Grits had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The Investigative Committee has opened a case on charges of murder.
Ekho Moskvy among the last independent media outlets in Russia and has been repeatedly been issued warnings by the state media watchdog Roskomnadzor.
The government agency in February said the station was violating a Russian law passed in 2016 restricting foreign media ownership to no more than 20 percent of shares.
Earlier this month, Russian state-run media accused Ekho Moskvy of working with unspecified “Western non-profits” to influence Russia’s 2018 presidential election.
Asked if the topic of her most recent radio show could be behind the attack, Venediktov declined to speculate and said he would leave it to the police.
He cited a string of attacks on women journalists at Ekho which had not been prosecuted: Yuliya Latyna, whose car and home were attacked before she fled Russia last month, and also threats against Ekho journalists Kseniya Larina and Karina Orlova, who also left Russia.
“It is precisely this impunity that enables psychiatrically-unstable people to commit these attacks,” he said.
In a statement on the attack, the Journalists’ Trade Union said that part of the blame falls on state television.
“The television network Rossiya-24 has repeatedly aired segments accusing Ekho Moskvy journalists, and personally Tatyana Felgenhauer, of working ‘for the U.S. State Department’ and cooperating with certain Western NGOs, criticizing the government, and even supposedly participating in Alexey Navalny’s protests.”
