The Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, from the research platform Bellingcat, said Friday that the British authorities want to prevent him from going to the BAFTA awards, on Sunday in London, for allegedly representing “a danger to public safety”.
Christo Grozev, whose journalistic investigation helped expose the plot to poison Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, was due to attend Sunday’s BAFTA British film and television awards ceremony, for which the documentary is nominated Navalny.
But on Friday, on the social network Twitter, the journalist expressed surprise, as the British police said they were concerned about possible “hostile intentions by foreign states towards certain journalists”. The reason invoked, says the journalist, is that he and his family “represent a risk to public safety”.
Christo Grozev, 53, who is on a search and capture list for Russia, lamented that, for journalists, the dangers come not only “from murderous dictators”, but also from the silencing of their voices “by the civilized world they try to serve”. .
According to Agence France-Presse, the London police said that, in fact, they cannot ban anyone from participating in the BAFTAs, because it is a private event, but the organizers of the ceremony “have to make difficult choices to decide how to reduce the risks of security”.
Grozev, who does not share his location for security reasons, has investigated the poisonings of opposition politician Alexey Navalny and former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and has more recently focused on alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine.