As the Moscow Times reports:

A liberal-leaning newspaper claimed Wednesday that the Investigative Committee’s chairman threatened one of its reporters, who has since fled the country for fear of his safety.

Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov, in an open letter published on the newspaper’s website, accused Alexander Bastrykin of making the threats on a roadside bordering a Moscow region forest after the reporter had been driven there by Bastrykin’s security guards.

Muratov later told Radio Liberty that the reporter, deputy editor Sergei Sokolov, had fled the country. Muratov has not disclosed the actual threats.

Sokolov was alone with Bastrykin when the threats were made, the letter said. Bastrykin is one of the nation’s most senior law enforcement officials.

Recently, Sokolov wrote that he was outraged by the relatively soft sentencing of Sergei Tsepovyaz, a reputed member of the notorious Kushchyovskaya gang, which murdered 12 people, including small children, in 2011.

Tsepovyaz was fined 150,000 rubles ($4,600) for covering up the crime. The court ruled that he did not participate in the murder. Two other men who share Tsepovyaz’s last name were found guilty of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In the article on the crime, Sokolov calls Bastrykin, as well as President Vladimir Putin and Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, “servants of countless Russian ‘Tsapoks.'” The Kushchyovskaya gang’s reputed mastermind, Sergei Tsapok, is currently in jail awaiting trial.

Muratov said Sokolov has since publicly apologized for that remark.

In 2006, Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who gained prominence for her reporting from Chechnya, was gunned down near her residence in Moscow. Her murder remains unsolved.

Muratov said in the letter Wednesday that Bastrykin spoke negatively about the paper’s editorial policy and mentioned Politkovskaya in a derogatory way.

Muratov stated that while he took Bastrykin’s words “seriously,” he declined to quote Bastrykin’s words against Politkovskaya in order “not to participate in a clan war of law enforcement officials.”

Muratov was referring to the ongoing struggle between the Investigative Committee and the General Prosecutor’s Office over political influence.

The reformed Investigative Committee now has authority over all the nation’s investigations, whereas the Prosecutor General’s Office has lost its ability to investigate crimes on its own.

The Investigative Committee did not comment on the alleged threats by Wednesday evening.

Muratov called on Bastrykin to “guarantee security” for Sokolov and said the threats were “empty” due to Bastrykin’s “emotional state.”

The alleged threats against Sokolov prompted protests outside the Investigative Committee’s headquarters on Wednesday.

Published three times a week, Novaya Gazeta is jointly owned by billionaire Alexander Lebedev and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Analysts said such threats might have stemmed from Bastrykin’s personal ties to Putin. The two were classmates at Leningrad University Law School.

Vladimir Prybilovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, said Bastrykin’s connections to Putin make him “rather powerful.”

Prybilovsky said Bastrykin is someone who would “pursue a hardline course” against the opposition, referring to searches conducted at homes of opposition leaders, including Alexei Navalny, on the eve of Tuesday’s protest march in Moscow.

United Russia Deputy Alexander Khinshtein said at the time that Bastrykin was trying to “serve” Putin by putting pressure on the opposition.

Yelena Pozdnyakova, an expert with the Center for Political Technologies, said Bastrykin is trying to suppress negative publicity against him, which shows that he is “nervous” about the situation.

“Novaya Gazeta has always irritated him,” she said.

But Pozdnyakova added that it is still unclear whether Novaya Gazeta, known for its highly critical articles, might have exaggerated the scandal in order to attack Bastrykin, Putin’s ally.

This is not the first time that Bastrykin has been mired in a media scandal.

In 2008, United Russia Deputy Khinshtein accused Bastrykin, then a deputy prosecutor, of possessing undeclared property abroad.

It turned out that the property had been registered before Bastrykin became a law enforcement official.

Ryabinin had originally been accused of abuse of authority back in March, having allegedly forced real estate businesspeople contracted with the city government to give his daughter a free 200-plus square meter apartment in the center of the capital. However, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov spoke out in his deputy’s defense, and a week later the case was dropped.

The new bribery charges were revealed yesterday when Chairman Alexander Bastrykin of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office was quoted in Rossiyskaya Gazeta regarding the real estate scandal.

“It’s difficult for me to assess the reasons and motives for the decision taken by the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office to annul the decree to file a criminal case against Ryabinin,” said Bastrykin.

He then added that, as a result of additional investigating, a criminal suit had been filed against Ryabinin for taking bribes. Given Ryabinin’s status as a government official, the charge carries a sentence of between 5 and 10 years in prison.

However, Bastrykin went on, “at this time the suspect has already managed to successfully flee the territory of the country.”

The Moscow mayor’s office issued a denial that the deputy mayor had left Russia entirely, saying that he was simply on vacation. But on Tuesday, a source in the city administration told Gazeta.ru that Ryabinin was definitely abroad.

“There’s a terrible panic in the mayor’s office now,” said the source. “Measures are being taken to return Ryabinin to Russia. As far as I know, Bastrykin was given the go-ahead from the top to make an open statement: Ryabinin is a person who is close to Luzhkov.”

Russia has long suffered from widespread corruption and bribery in particular. A 2009 survey by Transparency International ranked Russia at 146 on the global Corruption Perceptions Index, noting that 29 percent of Russians had given a bribe at least once in the past year. The most recent comprehensive study on the topic, conducted in 2005, estimated that ordinary Russians exchanged more than $3 billion in bribes annually – a figure that doesn’t include the $316 billion paid by businesses and entrepreneurs.