Journalists on Russia’s leading investigative newspaper are being made targets for assassination in a bid to force its closure, one of its owners said yesterday.

Alexander Lebedev said that at least three reporters on Novaya Gazeta, the opposition paper that also employed Anna Politkovskaya, had been assigned bodyguards because of fears for their lives.

He had asked the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, to allow staff to carry guns after accusing the Russian state of failing to protect them.

Mr Lebedev, the new owner of the Evening Standard, was speaking out after the lawyer Stanislav Markelov was assassinated on a street in central Moscow. Anastasia Baburova, a young Novaya Gazeta journalist, was also shot dead in the attack in broad daylight on Monday.

Mr Markelov had provided legal advice to journalists working on investigations at Novaya Gazeta for eight years. He was killed by a lone gunman shortly after holding a press conference to denounce the early release of a former Russian army colonel jailed for the murder of a Chechen woman.

Investigators have suggested that Mr Markelov was killed in relation to this case, which was first investigated by Ms Politkovskaya. Her assassination on Vladimir Putin’s birthday in October 2006 sparked worldwide outrage.

But Mr Lebedev said that the lawyer’s murder was tied to his work for Novaya Gazeta and that Ms Baburova, 25, may also have been murdered for her reporting on neo-Nazi groups in Russia. She was the third reporter on the paper to be killed or to die in mysterious circumstances since 2003.

“We have no doubts at the newspaper that this is connected to his work at the paper,” Mr Lebedev said. “Some of our journalists have been under protection for quite a long time now.” He disclosed that staff had been working on investigation that was so sensitive that editors had not yet published it out of concern for the reporters’ safety.

“The editors feel personal responsibility for people dying and are saying that perhaps we just have to close it. I understand their position, I too feel a responsibility personally that people are dying.”

Mr Lebedev told The Times later that he did not believe the paper was the target of an organised conspiracy, but that an atmosphere of lawlessness in Moscow allowed people to kill with impunity.

“It could be anybody from Chechen clans who are shooting each other in broad daylight to Nazi supporters who are reacting to these killings with joy on websites. It could be anyone as long as it’s so easy and they can get away with it,” he said.

Mr Lebedev said that the Kremlin “didn’t give a damn” and had not even offered its condolences. He added: “I can write that they have stolen hundreds of billions in the last three or four years but so what? They can sit there for another 20 years, with no parties, no elections, no proper media or judicial system and what are we going to do about it?”

Dmitri Muratov, Novaya Gazeta’s editor, said that the paper had started to publish articles without reporters’ names or with pseudonyms because of the threats they faced.

Yulia Latynina, one of the paper’s columnists and an outspoken critic of Mr Putin, described the mood at the paper by recalling an official notice she had read about a corpse. It said that the deceased was a Russian citizen with “no other external damage on the body”.

“That sums it up. We are citizens of Russia and it is quite dangerous now to be a citizen of Russia,” she said.

The reporters continued their investigations because “somebody has to do it”, she said, adding: “Somebody has to call a spade a spade and it will be much more dangerous to live in Russia without doing this.”

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