WORLD : Fire Hits Radical Soviet Weekly
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MOSCOW — Fire swept through the offices of the outspoken reformist weekly Moscow News before dawn today and editor-in-chief Yegor Yakovlyev said arson could not be excluded.
One person was killed jumping from a fifth-floor window of an adjacent actors’ club and three firemen were injured fighting the fire.
Yakovlyev, who transformed the once unknown newspaper into a campaigning journal for radical causes, told a news conference: “We will go on publishing, but we will need help from our friends at home and abroad.”
Estimating damage at $8 million, he said: “With our finances, we could never cover this.”
A deputy in the Soviet parliament, Yakovlyev has often been bitterly criticized by conservatives but is reputed to have support among officials around President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
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