Unidentified attackers shot and killed Russian freelance reporter Orkhan Dzhemal and two colleagues – documentary filmmaker Aleksandr Rastorguyev and camera operator Kirill Radchenko – on July 30, 2018, while they were driving about 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) north of the town of Sibut in the Central African Republic. Dzhemal was 51.
A statement issued by the now-defunct Moscow-based investigative media outlet The Investigations Management Centre (TsUR), financed by exiled Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said at the time that the journalists were on assignment for TsUR to investigate actions in the country by the private Russian mercenary group Wagner.
On August 3, 2018, the Russian Foreign Ministry said the journalists were attacked while attempting to resist a robbery.
However, an investigation launched by Khodorkovsky following the killings, which was reported by privately owned British newspaper Independent, found that “expensive items” had been left in the journalists’ car following the attack, saying the incident was not “consistent with a robbery.”
In July 2023, Aleksandr Bikantov, the Russian ambassador to the CAR, told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti that CAR authorities were continuing their investigation, but Russian authorities had not “received any information indicating a breakthrough or even progress in the investigation.”
A representative of The Dossier Center, an investigative nonprofit project founded by Khodorkovsky, told CPJ in July 2023 on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns, that Dzhemal, Rastorguyev, and Radhcneko “were targeted from the start” of their trip by employees of Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin.
On the first anniversary of the killings, The Dossier Center released a report claiming the autopsies showed the killings “were deliberate and professionally executed” and “cannot be explained by a simple wish to take possession of the victims’ property.”
That report also said Dzhemal, Rastorguyev, and Radchenko were under “thoroughly planned and organized” surveillance by CAR law enforcement agencies before they were killed.
On the day of the attack, a vehicle carrying three armed white men and two Central African residents, including CAR gendarme Emmanuel Touaguende Kotofio, passed through a checkpoint about 20 minutes ahead of the journalists’ jeep, according to a January 2019 article by the independent Russian broadcaster Dozhd TV, citing research by The Dossier Center.
The Dossier Center’s report stated Kotofio repeatedly communicated with Bienvenue Duvokama, the journalists’ driver and a former gendarme. According to multiple news reports, Kotofio was also in regular contact with alleged Wagner member Aleksandr Sotov, who in turn communicated with Valery Zakharov, reportedly head of a Wagner team in the country and an adviser to CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadéra.
The Dossier Center’s report said Russian authorities had not questioned Sotov or Zakharov about their alleged connection to the killings. The center’s representative who communicated with CPJ said Duvokama had been abducted in Cameroon in 2021 and subsequently “vanished without leaving any trace.” CPJ was unable to find contact information for Duvokama, Sotov, or Zakharov.
CAR Communications Minister Ange Maxime Kazagui told CPJ in 2018 that the journalists’ driver said the attackers spoke Arabic rather than the commonly spoken local languages of French or Sango.
Nadezhda Kevorkova, a journalist and a friend of Dzhemal’s, told CPJ in May 2023 that the journalists’ computers, cameras, phones, and hard drives containing footage remained in the hands of the Russian Investigative Committee and had not been returned to the families.
The journalists’ belongings, including their “clothes with traces of wounds,” were burned after their deaths, according to Kevorkova and news reports.
Kevorkova told the Daily Beast that Dzhemal’s phone had been hacked weeks before the attack while he was in Russia, and she believed he was under surveillance before and during the trip.
Dzhemal, Rastorguyev, and Radchenko had coordinated their reporting in the CAR through a fixer known as “Martin,” identified as a Dutch national and U.N. employee whose contact information was provided to the journalists by Kirill Romanovsky, a correspondent with the Russian Information Agency Federal News Agency (RIA FAN), according to news reports and The Dossier Center.
RIA FAN is part of a media organization whose board of trustees is headed by Prigozhin.
Vladimir Monteiro, spokesperson and head of media relations for the U.N.’s Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic, told CPJ at the time that he had no knowledge of anyone named "Martin."
Romanovsky never revealed Martin’s surname and died in January 2023, Kevorkova told CPJ, saying, “He took this mystery with him — who he informed about the planned trip to CAR and who ‘Martin’ was.”
In May 2024, a Moscow court placed Kevorkova under pretrial detention on charges of justifying terrorism in social media posts, which included a 2018 repost of a 2010 text by Dzhemal.
Dzhemal reported from battlefields in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Libya, Syria, eastern Ukraine, and South Ossetia and covered conflict for Russian news outlets, including Izvestiya, Kommersant, Novaya Gazeta, and Dozhd TV. In 2008, he published a book about the five-day war between Georgia and Russia. In a Dozhd TV tribute video, journalist Mikhail Fishman said Dzhemal had a “particular lack of fear.”