lithuania: a killing and a crusade

On October 12, 1993, after Vitas Lingys, deputy editor of the second-largest daily newspaper in Lithuania, left for work, his wife Laima Lingiene heard a popping sound. Rushing outside, she saw her husband lying in a pool of blood. "I knelt by him and took his hands," she said in her first published interview a year later. "I understood -- he is not just wounded." He was dead, in fact, with three bullets in his head fired from point-blank range.

Who would want to kill the thirty-three-year-old journalist? Colleagues on his newspaper, Respublika, a tabloid with a circulation of about 80,000, didn't think they had far to look. From the beginning of its six-year life, Respublika had put a priority on reporting crime. Coverage had been particularly intense during the year preceding Lingys's murder, as Respublika came out with story after story about the growing strength of the criminal underworld in Lithuania, particularly a group based in the capital known as the Vilnius Brigade.

The pieces certainly were relevant. Since regaining independence in 1991, Lithuania, the former Soviet republic on the Baltic Sea, has been plagued by the same daunting problems confronting all societies of post-communist Europe -- staggering economic crises, weak and sometimes corrupt government officials, and a power vacuum that criminals are all too quick to exploit. The crime rate has tripled since 1988.

Lingys's murder signaled another sinister trend in the former Soviet Union. He was the first, but unfortunately not the last, journalist to be similarly executed:

 ¥ On October 17, 1994, almost one year to the day after Lingys's death, another investigative journalist, a twenty-seven-year-old Russian named Dmitry Kholodov, of the Moskovski Komsomolets, known for his reports on corruption and graft in the Russian army, was killed when he opened a briefcase containing a bomb.

 ¥ Seven days after that, Khamidjon Khakimov, the thirty-year-old editor of an Uzbek-language newspaper in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, another former Soviet republic, was shot in the head.

 ¥ And on March 1, a popular and powerful television journalist, Vladislav Listyev, who had recently been named executive director of Ostankino, Russia's public television network, was shot to death outside his Moscow apartment. The case remains unsolved, but a mob hit is a strong working theory.

The reaction to Lingys's murder at Respublika, meanwhile, provides an unusual window into journalism these days in Eastern Europe. If the paper's coverage of local underworld activities had been active before his murder, after the murder it became a crusade for editor-in-chief Vitas Tomkus. Streetwise and clever, Tomkus, known for his signature black-leather jacket and omnipresent cigarette, was the closest thing to an investigative reporter that Lithuania had in her last days as a Soviet republic. Respublika bears his stamp. It is sassy, irreverent, and funny -- but also often in poor taste. While many readers chuckle over not-so-subtle jibes at the political leadership, others are outraged by Respublika's insensitivities to various individuals or religious, political, social, or ethnic groups. Journalist Daiva Vilk- elyte wrote, in a rival publication last year, that "for all its journalistic resourc-es, and unde- niable zip and punch, Respublika is arguably a corrosive, rather than positive, influence on the public life of the newly reborn state."

Tomkus makes it clear that in the Lingys case, personal loyalties propelled journalistic action. "For five years, Lingys was my best friend," he says. The slain journalist's black-and-white photo portrait hangs above his desk, dried flowers tucked behind the frame.

After the Lingys killing, Tomkus created a four-man team of reporters, all in their twenties -- among them, Lingys's younger brother, Audrius -- to investigate the murder. The team has been aided by its ties to the Lithuan-ian prosecutor's office, coincidentally and conveniently housed right next door to the paper
 on a side street in downtown Vilnius.

 Journalist Vilkelyte also criticized Respublika's handling of the murder investigation, writing that "the methods used in reporting organized crime are questionable. Documents from the Interior Ministry and prosecutor's office are leaked with remarkable frequency and little complaint. No sooner is a serious crime committed than Respublika has named the guilty party, long before the tedious judicial process has begun. After Lingys's murder, it was Respublika, not the authorities, who named the alleged killers and then, in an epic nineteen-part series, gave minute 'details' of the crime's planning and execution, concluding with a demand for the death penalty for the assassins."

Tomkus admits violating "canons of journalism" by, for example, publishing information that "wasn't always checked." Defense attorneys for Boris Dekanidze, accused of ordering the murder, and for the two confessed hitmen in the case blamed the paper in part for a lynch mob atmosphere at the trial last October. Nonetheless, all are in prison.

Tomkus worries now that the post-trial period is dangerous for his reporters, and they agree. Several have moved their families into hiding. "We live in fear all the time," says Virginijus Gaivenis, who headed the team. "A bomb can be placed in your car. At night you wake up from nightmares." And Gaivenis knows he is not the only investigative journalist in Eastern Europe these days who goes to sleep with a loaded pistol next to his bed.

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