- (AFP) - Speculation mounted in Russia over what had happened
to a presidential candidate who is backed by an exiled tycoon and Kremlin
critic and has mysteriously gone missing five weeks before the election.
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- Some suggested that the disappearance of Ivan Rybkin,
whose campaign is financed by Boris Berezovsky, the controversial self-exiled
tycoon and President Vladimir Putin's political foe, was staged as a publicity
stunt.
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- Rybkin went missing after he left his apartment in Moscow
on Thursday evening and news of the 57-year-old's disappearance did not
become public until the weekend.
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- On Sunday, Moscow police began a search for the former
parliamentary speaker who was seen as having little hope of winning the
March 14 election.
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- The story was splashed across the front pages of most
Moscow newspapers on Monday, as observers speculated what could have happened
to the ally of Kremlin's most vociferous critic.
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- Some suggested that Rybkin's disappearance was a publicity
stunt organized by Berezovsky ahead of the elections.
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- "I am 99 percent certain that this is yet another
political stunt organized by Berezovsky," the Interfax news agency
quoted Gennady Gudkov, a deputy from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party,
as saying.
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- Gudkov said that Rybkin had in fact been found and was
in a health spa outside the Russian capital.
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- The health spa itself denied the charge to Moscow Echo
radio and Moscow police said their investigation of the deputy's charge
has come to naught.
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- Central election commission chairman Alexander Veshnyakov
said in televised comments over the weekend that he had his "own version"
of what had happened to Rybkin, but he did not want to publicize it.
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- The Moscow prosecutor's office said Monday that it had
opened a murder inquiry into the case, but in a highly unusual move, withdrew
the statement an hour later, saying it did not have enough evidence for
such an investigation.
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- The reversal apparently came at the request of the general
prosecutor's office.
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- "The criminal investigation was opened too early,"
an official with the general prosecutor's office was quoted as saying by
news agencies.
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- Prosecutors Monday also questioned Rybkin's wife as part
of the investigation.
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- News of Rybkin's disappearance broke after he registered
Saturday as one of seven candidates in a presidential vote which Putin
is widely expected to win.
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- Rybkin has an approval rate of about one percent of voters,
according to recent opinion polls, and has been a bit player in Russian
politics since losing his post as speaker of the State Duma lower house
of parliament in 1996.
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- He currently leads a wing of the splintered Liberal Russia
party that has remained faithful to Berezovsky since the party split in
2003.
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- Berezovsky, a fierce Putin opponent who is wanted on
fraud charges in Moscow, has been in self-exile in Britain since October
2001 where he has obtained political asylum.
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- He created Liberal Russia in 2002 but the party split
in a fallout over Berezovksy's policies.
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- The head of the anti-Berezovsky camp in Liberal Russia,
Sergei Yushenkov, was killed outside his Moscow apartment last April.
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- Six people went before a jury trial for the murder on
Monday. Prosecutors charge them with having carried out the murder as a
result of a tug-of-war for influence over the party.
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- One of the suspects has fully admitted his guilt in the
case and two have partially done so, news agencies reported Monday.
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- Both party factions still claim the name of Liberal Russia.
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