e current affairs magazine Novaya Gazeta, was on her way to the siege in Beslan from Moscow when she collapsed mysteriously.

According to the Moscow Times today, "Politkovskaya was flying from Vnukovo Airport to Rostov-on-Don and fainted on the plane. Immediately after landing, she was taken to a local hospital, where doctors found she had been poisoned, Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists."

Muratov said Politkovskaya had not eaten anything that day and that she felt sick after drinking tea on the plane. He did not speculate on who might have poisoned her. Politkovskaya is now recovering in a Moscow clinic.

Politkovskaya has written repeatedly about Russia's brutal war in Chechnya, much to the fury of the Putin regime. She claims to have seen video footage that shows Chechen prisoners being treated the same way as those in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq but says no Russian TV channel would show it. When her paper published pictures no other papers followed up the story.

Earlier this year she accused the rest of the Russian media of acting as black propaganda agencies.

Ironically though, Novaya Gazeta condemned the hostage-takers almost as fiercely as those with no time for the Chechen separatist cause.

The allegation that she was poisoned with the intention of preventing her from covering the Beslan siege comes as the Russian media has been hit by two other strange incidents - the sacking of the editor of Izvestia and the detention of another prominent journalist who was trying to cover the siege.

Radio reporter Andrei Babitsky was prevented from reaching Beslan after he was arrested and sentenced to five day's jail for "hooliganism" at an airport after he was provoked into a fight.

He had been trying to catch a flight at Vnukuvo airport and had already been detained by police, who searched for explosives in his bag.

The incidents happened in the middle of last week as the panic-stricken Russians tried to play down the siege, claiming there were as few as 300 people in the school.

Together with today's apparent sacking of Izvestia's editor, Raf Shakirov, in the wake of graphic accounts of the disaster in Saturday's newspaper, they represent an alarming development for those fighting to maintain a free press in Russia.

TV channels censored school siege

The horrific events at the end of last week have sharpened complaints that the Russian media is either unable or unwilling to do its job properly.

Restrained and allegedly biased TV coverage of Friday's drama sparked an outcry in certain corners of the country's press, with some commentators - including Izvestia's Irina Petrovskaya - angry that Russia's three main channels hesitated to show live footage from the besieged school and then kept their reporting cautious and unquestioning.

When it came to covering the unfolding tragedy on Friday, two of Russia's main TV channels did not mention what was happening in Beslan until an hour after explosions were first heard at the school.

State-owned Rossia TV and Channel One broke their silence at 2pm - with Channel One returning to a serial of "Women in Love" just 10 minutes later.

On Rossia, an hour-long news bulletin "downplayed" what was happening, according to Russian press reports, before returning to the "Red Chapel" spy series.

Only on NTV, which is owned by state-controlled company Gazprom, was there rolling coverage - for three hours - even though it had started late, at 1.30pm.

Until then, only viewers with access to BBC World, CNN or EuroNews had been able to see pictures of semi-naked and wounded children bursting out of the school as occasional explosions and bursts of gunfire could be heard in the background.

The apparent timidity of the TV channels may well have been influenced by the precedent of the Dubrovka theatre siege in October 2002, when NTV was criticised with claims it jeopardised the mission to save the people held captive inside the building.

In the end, 129 hostages and 41 terrorists died following a botched attempt to bring the siege to an end involving a lethal dose of gas being pumped into the theatre by Russian forces.

This time NTV reported government statements without making any additional comments, as it had done during its coverage of the theatre siege.

NTV has paid the price for outspokenness: a few months after the theatre siege, its general director, Boris Jordan, lost his job.

More recently, two prominent presenters were taken off air in controversial circumstances.

In July, Savik Shuster, host of the highly rated Svoboda Slova (Free Speech) television programme was relieved of his duties less than a week after criticising politicians for refusing to debate new social legislation.

A month earlier Leonid Parfyonov, a well-known satirist, was taken off air for trying to broadcast an interview with the widow of the slain Chechen leader, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev.

NTV, formerly owned by the media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky, was taken over by the state-controlled company Gazprom in 2001 after Mr Gusinsky sold the network and fled to Israel.

The last fully independent channel, TVS, was shut down and replaced with a sports channel last year.

The reason given for the closure was the station's financial problems, but critics of the Kremlin pointed to its timing, a few months before the elections which saw Mr Putin given his second term as president.

But while the broadcasters appear to be controlled to varying degrees by the government, the press has shown greater vigour in questioning the official version of events.

A number of newspapers have poured scorn on the security authorities for failing to protect the public and have also explicitly linked the terrorist outrage in Beslan with the failure of Russian military involvement in Chechnya.

Accusing the government of lying, some papers are viewing claims that Arab terrorists were involved as a smokescreen to diminish the government's culpability.

The Saturday issue of privately-owned Izvestia featured shocking pictures of wounded and dead children and other victims of the hostage crisis.

Columnist Irina Petrovskaya was openly critical of the TV coverage. "My God, how our valiant state television stations took fright and lost their heads," she wrote.

Izvestia was one of the first Russian media outlets to cast doubt on the government's now disproved claim that only about 350 hostages were being held captive in the school - less than a third of the actual number.

Now it seems Mr Shakirov may have lost his job over the line his paper took.

· To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857

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