Yelena Tregubova, a former Kremlin pool reporter and author of several books about Russian political elite, has applied for political asylum in Great Britain, the Ekho Moskvy radio reported on Tuesday quoting Tregubova’s own statement.

After the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya last year, Tregubova wrote an open letter to Western leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in which she called on them to demand that Putin stop political murders, human rights abuses and restrictions on the press.

The Interfax news agency reported that the British embassy in Moscow refused to comment on the news saying that it was not a common practice to comment of single cases of asylum-seeking.

Between 1997 and 2001 Tregubova was a member of the Kremlin press pool, reporting for the independent Moscow dailies Kommersant, Izvestiya, and Russky Telegraf.

Her political best-seller, Tales of a Kremlin Digger, was published in October 2003 and criticized the Putin administration for muzzling the press.

She lost her access to the Kremlin pool because she refused to adhere to the official version of events. After the book appeared, she lost her job as a correspondent for Kommersant.

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