Irina Petrushova

Irina Albertovna Petrushova (; born 1965) After a series of stories exposing government corruption in Kazakhstan, her life was threatened and her paper firebombed. In 2002, she was awarded a CPJ International Press Freedom Award.

Early life Petrushova was born near Nizhny Novgorod in 1965.

Petrushova married a psychologist in 1984. The couple have two sons. the dog's head was left outside Petrushova's home. Three days after the dog incident, the papers' offices were firebombed and burned to the ground. In July, Petrushova was given an eighteen-month jail sentence on tax charges, but served no time after a judge ruled that the case fell under an amnesty.

In April 2005 Petrushova was briefly detained in Volokolamsk near Moscow in Russia at the request of Kazakh authorities who sought her detention on charges of tax evasion and violating Kazakh citizenship laws. After Moscow prosecutors ruled that the statute of limitations had expired on the charges, Kazakhstan's request for her extradition was denied. Petrushova was released a few days later. She had also been detained on the same charges in St. Petersburg in 2004.