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Russian Minister Sinichev: Died "while doing his official duty"
Photo: ALEXEY NIKOLSKY / AFP
The Russian civil protection minister Yevgeny Sinichev is dead. According to official information, he was killed in a rescue operation in the Arctic.
The 55-year-old politician tragically died while "fulfilling his official duty," the ministry said, according to Russian news agencies.
Sinichev wanted to save another person's life during an exercise by the emergency services, it said.
The ministry did not initially provide any more detailed information on the circumstances of the death.
According to Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state-funded news channel RT, Sinichev died trying to rescue a cameraman who slipped and fell into the water.
The news website RBC, citing an anonymous source, reported that Zinichev was killed while filming a training video for the Ministry of Emergency Situations.
"He was trying to hold on to a member of the film crew who had slipped off the edge of a cliff," the source said.
Accordingly, the cameraman also died in the incident.
A two-day exercise, 6,000 rescue workers
According to the agencies, during the two-day exercise, in which a total of around 6,000 rescue workers took part, among other things, the rescue of people from the Arctic should be trained.
In the morning, the Ministry of Civil Protection announced that Zinichev had traveled to the city of Norilsk on the Arctic Ocean.
There he visited the construction site of a fire station.
The minister had previously monitored fire fighting operations in eastern Siberia.
Sinichev had headed the ministry since 2018.
He began his career as a KGB officer in the late 1980s and later served with the Russian domestic intelligence service FSB.
According to the Moscow Times, the Kremlin announced that President Vladimir Putin had been informed of the death.
asa / dpa