A Russian journalist is in hospital after being lured out of his home and stabbed 20 times late on Monday night in the latest attack on a member of the press.
Sergei Aslanyan, 46, works for Radio Mayak and spent 10 years as a presenter on Echo Moskvy, Russia's leading liberal radio station.
Police sources said Aslanyan received a call from an unknown number just before midnight, inviting him outside for a chat. After leaving his home in southern Moscow, he was stabbed repeatedly in the chest, neck and arms by a man, or several men, wielding a knife.
"The victim has been hospitalised, his life is not in danger," a police source told the Itar-Tass news agency.
Police have opened an investigation into the attack.
The Izvestiya newspaper suggested the attack could have been linked to a recent radio appearance during which Aslanyan insulted the prophet Muhammad.
The programme prompted an angry response among some Muslims, with an imam in the eastern city of Kazan asking prosecutors to investigate the journalist.
Others linked the attack to Aslanyan's reporting on Russia's auto industry and corrupt traffic police.
Russia maintains one of the world's worst records for freedom of the press, with journalists regularly attacked and pressured because of their work. More than 50 journalists have been killed in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Most of the murders, including the 2006 killing of investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, remain unsolved.
Diana Khachatryan, a journalist who works at Politkovskaya's paper, Novaya Gazeta, said on Monday she had received threatening telephone calls after exposing the inner workings of a congress run by Vladimir Putin's United Russia party.
Khachatryan said a woman claiming to be from the Young Guard, United Russia's youth wing, called her at 1pm on Monday, hours after her article exposing the theatrical aspect of the congress, was published by Novaya Gazeta, a leading liberal newspaper and website.
"She said that I behaved improperly, like a rat, and if I don't take down the text, it will be bad," Khachatryan told the Novaya Gazeta website.
"She said, 'Think about it yourself – take down the article. If you don't want to, then we'll see what comes next'."
Novaya Gazeta said it "approaches any fact of a threat towards its journalists with all seriousness and will demand an official investigation".
