Putin silent as murder outcry grows

The Scotsman
9 Oct 06

CHRIS STEPHEN IN MOSCOW

RUSSIA'S chief prosecutor yesterday took personal charge of the investigation into the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, as international pressure mounted to find the killer.

Ms Politkovskaya, 48, was gunned down in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment.

She was a leading critic of president Vladimir Putin and had won prizes with exposés of human rights violations by Russian security forces in Chechnya.

Her murder on Saturday night - Mr Putin's birthday - has sent shockwaves around the world and tributes poured in throughout yesterday.

The US State Department said it was "shocked and profoundly saddened" by her death, and urged Russia to hold a full investigation.

Her editor, Dmitry Murtov of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta said: "She defended the poor and miserable."

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said the killing was a "devastating development for journalism in Russia".

Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, occasionally the target for her reports, said he was "deeply outraged and shocked" by the killing of "an honest journalist and also a woman and a mother".

But there was no word from Mr Putin. The Kremlin website said that he held a security council meeting yesterday but made no mention of her death.

She had critics, even among her many admirers, with some editors fearing she allowed opinion to trump fact.

"She really believed in justice, and sometimes she ignored lots of facts and details which didn't go with her conception," Dmitry Sabov, foreign editor of Moscow's leading independent news magazine, Ogoniok, told The Scotsman. "Her major themes, the North Caucuses, Chechnya, and corruption in the Russian society in any form - didn't leave indifferent anyone in Russia and made her lots of enemies."

Yet with so much of the media, and all TV stations, in state hands, many in Moscow felt profound loss.

Supporters gathered outside her apartment, leaving flowers and burning candles. A vigil formed at Pushkin Square in the city centre.

In her book, Putin's Russia, Ms Politkovskaya accused the former KGB man of turning Russia into a dictatorship, with corruption and human rights violations unchecked and democracy subverted.

The task of Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika will not be easy. One suspect, at least one suggested in Ms Politkovskaya's writings, is Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Russian prime minister of Chechnya.

She has repeatedly accused him of running the province like a gangster fiefdom with systematic abuses ignored by Moscow in return for him keeping Islamic fighters on the back foot.

She was about to publish a new exposé on torture in Chechnya, timed just as Mr Kadyrov positions himself to be appointed president of the war-torn republic. Ms Polikovskaya wrote that he had told subordinates that he wanted her dead, though he has denied this.

The only clue publicly released is grainy CCTV footage apparently showing her killer, wearing a baseball cap, entering her apartment building shortly before she was killed with four bullets.

Mr Kadyrov is not the only person with a grudge. Ms Politkovskaya has made powerful enemies throughout the Russian security apparatus. In 2001 she fled to Austria after being tipped off that a police commander she had written about was planning to assassinate her.

And in 2004, flying to cover the Beslan massacre, she sipped drugged tea on a plane, went into a coma and woke up in hospital.

In 2000 she was kidnapped in Chechnya by pro-Russian forces and subjected to a mock execution. She also criticised Chechen forces for their own abuse of rights, but she enjoyed widespread support among ordinary Chechens.

Her killing piles pressure on a government already struggling with the unsolved assassination last month of the deputy governor of the Central Bank, Andrei Kozlov. Like Ms Politkovskaya, he had established a reputation for rooting around for the truth, in his case an investigation into dozens of banks he suspected were fronts for money laundering.