THE president of the Russian Union of Journalists, Mr Vsevolod Bogdanov, and the head of the monitoring section of the Committee to Defend Glasnost, Mr Oleg Pamfilov, have condemned the murder of Veronica Guerin and expressed condolences to her family.
So far this year, 11 journalists from Russia, one from Ukraine and one from Armenia have been killed.
Mr Bogdanov said the sympathy of Russian journalists, who knew only too well the dangers of investigating drug related crime, went to Ms Guerin's husband, her young son and family.
Mr Pamfilov asked the Guerin family to accept his organisation's condolences and said: "It is a great shame that in a civilised, democratic country such as Ireland, a journalist can be murdered while pursuing her duty."
Russia and the states of the former Soviet Union have, along with Algeria, the worst record for journalistic murders. Of the 11 members of the Russian media who died this year, four were killed in the war in Chechnya but only two actually died in fighting.
In March, the body of Ms Valentina Chaikova of the Moscow newspaper Obshchaya Gazeta was found in a village cemetery in Chechnya. A post mortem examination showed that she had been beaten and shot. Last month Ms Nima Yefimova, a crime reporter for a local paper in Grozny, was kidnapped with her 70 year old mother and shot dead.
In Ukraine, also in May, Mr Igor Khrushchetsky, who had been a witness in a criminal case, was killed outside his apartment in the same month Mr Viktor Nikulin, a crime correspondent for a local newspaper in the Siberian city of Chita, was murdered.
In February alone, four journalists lost their lives. The Interfax news agency correspondent in Tashkent, Mr Sergei Grebenyuk, who had been warned by criminal elements about his articles, was murdered. He had been attacked on three previous occasions. In Dalnogorsk in the Russian Far East, the bodies of cable TV producer Mr Alexander Zaitsev and director Mr Yuri Litvinov were found in an abandoned car and in Moscow a photographer of the German magazine Bild, Mr Feliks Solovyov, was shot dead in a Moscow street.
While politicians in Ireland have vowed to use all the State's powers to apprehend Ms Guerin's murderers, in some cases in Russia security forces have been suspected of involvement in murder.
The most celebrated case took place in October 1994, when Mr Dmitri Kholodov (27), a reporter from a popular newspaper, was investigating corruption at a high level in the army. He was told that a briefcase containing documents would be given to him at the city's Kazan railway station. The briefcase exploded when opened, killing Mr Kholdov.
Earlier this month, Ms Natalia Alyakina, who worked for a German radio station, was stopped at a checkpoint in Southern Russia by interior ministry forces while, travelling in a car with her husband, Mr Gizbert Mrozek, a German citizen. The troops waved the car on but it was then subjected to a volley of shots from and armoured vehicle, and Ms Alyakina was killed. A soldier is to stand trial for "careless handling of weapons".
Russia's most incisive and popular political interviewer, Mr Vladislav Listiev of the ORT television station, was shot dead outside his Moscow apartment in 1995.
