New York, October 7, 2003—CPJ mourns the loss of a television crew and their driver from the national state broadcaster Channel One, who died in a car accident in the Siberian region of Tyumen while on assignment.
Channel One journalist Natalia Astafyeva, cameraman Sergei Isakov, and driver Yuri Selyanov died on Saturday when their car collided with a truck on the Tyumen-Khanty Mansiik highway.
They were returning from Nizhnevartovsk, where they were shooting a piece on the daily life of local ethnic groups in the Khanty Mansiisk Autonomous District.
