Boris Mironov, former head of the Russian Print Media Committee who was prosecuted for anti-Semitic speeches he made in 2003 while running for the Novosibirsk Region's governorship, was arrested in Moscow Monday along with his son Ivan, who is himself suspected of an assassination attempt on the chief executive of the Russian electricity monopoly, Unified Energy System.
"The arrest of Boris Mironov has nothing to do with that of his son, who is charged with an attempt on Anatoly Chubais," said Natalya Markasova, a senior aide to the Novosibirsk Region's prosecutor.
Boris Mironov, who co-chaired a nationalist party that was denied registration in 2003, was dismissed from his post as print media minister in 1994 by then-President Boris Yeltsin for publications that stoked inter-ethnic hatred.
Ivan Mironov is a fourth suspect in an attempt to murder Chubais in March 2005, when his car came under automatic gunfire near Moscow.
According to prosecutors, the suspects allegedly acted out of their extremist views and a violent dislike of Chubais, an architect of economic reforms in the 1990s that impoverished millions and gave vast fortunes to a handful of well-connected oligarchs, and is now behind a series of unpopular decisions to raise electricity rates.
