Russia fires police YouTube whistleblower

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A junior Russian policeman was fired on Sunday after making a YouTube appeal to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accusing senior officers of corruption, a claim dismissed by authorities as false, news agencies reported.

The policeman from the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk last week posted a seven-minute clip that accused senior officers of forcing him to work weekends and solve imaginary crimes, as well as blocking him from claiming compensation for an injury.

"I want to show you from the inside the life of cops across Russia ... the ignorance, the boorishness, the recklessness, where officers die because of their dim-witted bosses," Alexei Dymovsky said in the video, posted on YouTube and his personal site, dymovskiy.ru.

After almost 200,000 viewings on YouTube and hundreds of media reports, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, responsible for the police, responded through a spokesman on Sunday with a promise of a probe into Dymovsky's accusations.

The probe would begin on Monday and the results would be presented to both Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, ITAR-TASS and RIA news agencies quoted ministry spokesman Valery Gribakin as saying.

But two hours later, the agencies quoted the same spokesman as saying a probe had been completed and that the officer in question had been fired "for libel and actions that tarnish the honor" of the police.

In an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio station, Dymovsky said he believed his car had been followed and that he would send his wife and daughter to Moscow for safety reasons.

(Writing by Conor Humphries, editing by Mark Trevelyan)