"Blasphemous fabrications": Peskov commented on the version of the death of Zinichev

According to the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the 55-year-old head of the department "died as a rescuer" on September 8 while trying to pull ashore the director Alexander Melnik who had fallen into the water.

“It was all told yesterday. And there are no versions there. There is one real version. Everything else is just such blasphemous enough fabrications that do not correspond to reality", - Kommersant quotes Peskov as saying.

The day before it became known that, having arrived on September 7 in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Yevgeny Zinichev opened a two-day interdepartmental experimental research exercise in the Arctic in Dudinka. And the very next day, Yevgeny Zinichev died at the Kitabo-Oron waterfall of the Irkingda River in the Putoransky Nature Reserve, 120 kilometers from Norilsk, Krasnoyarsk Territory. There, the film crew of director Alexander Melnik, who has long collaborated with the Emergencies Ministry, was looking for good locations for filming a new documentary about the development of the Arctic and the Northern Sea Route. While surveying the area, 63-year-old Alexander Melnik slipped while standing on the edge of a cliff and fell down. Zinichev jumped followed him to save him, but hit his head on a protruding stone, received a severe head injury and also died.

Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded Zinichev the title of Hero of Russia posthumously. Farewell to the general will be held on September 10 in Moscow, Putin intends to attend the ceremony.

Immediately after the death of Zinichev, various versions of what happened near Norilsk began to appear in the media and telegram channels. The publication "Taiga.info" reported that the official was killed not on Kitabo-Oron, but on Lake Lamo, where "high-ranking guests are regularly taken". Some sources reported that the trip of the head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations to the Krasnoyarsk Territory was not a business, but a tourist one, and it was not the general who saved the operator, but vice versa. During this time, some sources asserted that Zinichev fell off a cliff not during an exercise, not in the line of duty, but during a “sightseeing”. Some sources make adjustments to the previously released news after the appearance of the official version about the death of the general.