MOSCOW, July 02. /ITAR-TASS/. Colleagues and relatives are paying their last respects to Russian TV Channel One’s cameraman Anatoly Klyan on Wednesday. He was killed in the gunfire at a bus with journalists in east Ukraine’s Donetsk Region overnight to June 30.
At the first floor of Moscow Ostankino television center where Klyan had worked for 40 years his photo is placed surrounded by flowers. “We express deep condolences to relatives of our killed colleague,” the inscription to the photo reads. Klyan’s recent photos made during his office missions and at a favorite workplace are displayed along the staircase on the second floor. Corridors of the television broadcasting center are decorated with his photos taken in different years, showing Klyan’s career from a young just-employed cameraman to an experienced reporter who visited different parts of the world and has brought his video camera everywhere. There are also photos from his family archives and family photographs.
The Ostankino main television studio, where the last farewells ceremony is underway is decorated with dozens of candles, flowers and flower wreaths, including those from the Russian president, Emergencies Ministry, Russian Union of Journalists and his colleagues from other TV channels. Photos of the killed journalist are showed one after another on the screen.
Hundreds of Klyan’s colleagues, relatives and friends came to bid last farewells to him.
The tragedy happened at a military unit where the filming crew came to make their TV report. The press service of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic organized their office mission. Journalists were going in a bus together with mothers of military conscripts who intended to attain the return of their sons home. Ukrainian military forces have made gunshots unexpectedly already at the place of their reporting mission. Anatoly Klyan received a lethal wound to the abdomen. Later, Ukrainian medics found two gunshot wounds in him with one bullet presumably being off-centerd.
Klyan was born on January 23, 1946 and was 68 years old at the moment of killing. He has worked on television for 40 years, has made thousands of TV footages, went on hundreds of TV reporting missions, including in the areas of hostilities in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. He went on his last TV filming mission in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk on May 28.
Klyan’s colleagues described him as a remarkable cameraman, a perfect professional and a nice man. “He passed Yugoslavia, Iraq and Syria, went on missions in tens of trouble areas and always came back home alive. Last May, Tolya decided himself to go on this TV reporting mission, citing Ukrainian authorities’ restrictions on the age of arriving journalists, as he did not already come under effect of these restrictions and said in a joke that in this case his age became his advantage,” his friends recalled.
On Wednesday, Klyan will be buried at Troekurovskoye cemetery, where journalists of Russian central television and radio broadcaster VGTRK Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin are buried, after the latter were killed in the gunfire in Ukraine on June 17.