Prominent opposition journalist Yulia Latynina’s car was set on fire over the weekend in a possible assassination attempt, Latynina said Thursday.
“The investigator just informed us that the car ignited in three places,” Latynina said on air at the Ekho Moskvy radio station. “This is very sad because in fact it means that it was, unfortunately, not just a fire, it was an assassination attempt.”
During a previous broadcast, the journalist and Ekho Moskvy contributor cited an investigator who suggested that her car could have burned down because of faulty wiring. On Thursday she refuted such an explanation: “The hypothesis that the car burned down on its own, which my parents tried to console themselves with, is wrong.”
Latynina said that she was confident the latest incident was related to a July attack in which unidentified men released a foul-smelling gas into her family home through a window. That attack, she said, may have been perpetrated by the same people who poured a bucket of feces on her in August 2016.
In her Thursday broadcast Latynina said she was not in Russia during the Sept. 3 attack.
Latynina often voices opinions that are critical of the Kremlin on her Ekho Moskvy radio show and in her Novaya Gazeta newspaper column. She is also a former Moscow Times columnist.