Veteran RFE/RL Turkmen Service journalist Rozynazar Khudayberdiyev died of kidney failure in Prague on March 3rd. He was 66.
Khudayberdiyev joined the Service in 1995, authoring hundreds of radio programs during his tenure on Turkmen history, culture, and literature.
During the Soviet period, he worked briefly for state-run Turkmen Radio. He also work as a teacher and served in the Soviet Ministry of Education in Moscow.
RFE/RL's Turkmen service is a media pioneer in Turkmenistan, bringing local news reporting to domestic audiences on multiple platforms.
Although its website is permanently blocked inside the country and can be accessed only via proxy server, it attracted over one million visitors and almost two million page views in February this year.