A Russian journalist who was savagely beaten in 2008 has been cleared on appeal of defamation charges after widespread public outcry.
Mikhail Beketov, the former editor of the Khimkinskaya Pravda newspaper, was found guilty in November of slandering Vladimir Strelchenko, the mayor of Khimki, a town on the edge of Moscow. He was cleared on Friday due to a lack of evidence.
The court fined Beketov 5,000 rubles ($160) but later said the fine need not be paid due to a technicality.
Beketov, 52, was attacked after he criticized government plans to build a highway through the centuries-old Khimki oak forest. His leg was broken and later amputated, three fingers were broken and he was severely brain damaged.
The ruling prompted public outrage as it came in the wake of the brutal attack on Oleg Kashin, another journalist critical of the Khimki project.
There have been dozens of unsolved killings of journalists in Russia in recent years, including most infamously, that of Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce Kremlin critic, who was shot dead in her apartment block on Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's birthday four years ago.
Beketov and another Russian journalist, Olga Bobrova, won awards on Friday for their work from the Austrian branch of Reporters Without Borders.
KHIMKI, December 10 (RIA Novosti)
