Russian journalists barred from SS veterans' meeting in Estonia
TALLINN. July 26 (Interfax) - A columnist for a Russian daily said she had been barred from attending an annual meeting on Saturday of veterans of a former Estonian division of Nazi Germany's SS security force that she had planned to cover.
"My attempt to get to the site of the get-together was cut short by security guards from the Nord Guard firm and police," Galina Sapozhnikova of Komsomolskaya Pravda told Interfax.
Sapozhnikova said the guards and police, citing a police order, had told her and Igor Teterin, publisher and editor-in-chief of the newspaper's Baltic outlet, Komsomolskaya Pravda Baltiya, that they could not be let onto the site of the meeting in Sinimae in northwestern Estonia.
"I see this as an extremely gross violation of law and preventing a journalist from doing their work," Sapozhnikova said.
On Friday, reporters for Russia's Zvezda television, Maxim Gritsenko and Vyacheslav Amelyutin, were denied entry to Estonia for alleged violations of visa regulations. The two journalists had also been going to cover the meeting of former members of the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian).
Meetings of division veterans, which are normally attended by members of neo-Nazi and youth organizations, have been held in Sinimae on the last Saturday of July for many years.
