FIVE YEARS after campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in her Moscow apartment block, Russian prosecutors yesterday filed fresh charges against the men accused of killing her.
But as people laid flowers and candles outside the building where she was shot dead, doubts lingered in Russia and abroad over whether investigators had the will or the ability to discover who ordered the killing of the country’s most famous reporter.
Politkovskaya was the most tenacious and committed chronicler of the Kremlin’s dirty fight to defeat militants in Chechnya and across the North Caucasus, and her reports revealed not only the brutality of the campaign but the corruption and venality of the powerful figures who run it.
She had been threatened several times, and believed she was poisoned on a plane when flying to cover the 2004 school siege in Beslan, but her international reputation seemed to offer some protection from the violence that is an occupational hazard for lesser known Russian reporters.
That Politkovskaya could be gunned down in her stairwell showed that any critic of the Kremlin could be silenced. And for the case to still be open five years later underlines how corruption and impunity have only increased during Vladimir Putin’s 12 years as Russia’s president and prime minister.
October 7th is not only the date of Politkovskaya’s death. It is also Putin’s birthday.
He was quick to dismiss her importance to Russian society and to insist that her murder benefited his critics far more than it did him, saying, effectively, that she was more dangerous to him dead than alive.
But some people still accused him of ordering her murder, or of creating an atmosphere in which “disloyal” Russians could be eliminated; former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko blamed Putin for her death, just two weeks before he died of polonium poisoning in London.
Some speculated that Politkovskaya was killed as a birthday “gift” from current or former members of the security services to which Putin belonged; others said thuggish Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov had ordered the murder of a woman who accused him of heinous human rights abuses.
Kadyrov dismissed the claims, and suggested Politkovskaya’s death was part of attempts by oligarch Boris Berezovsky to discredit Putin, the man who drove him out of Russia a decade ago.
Prosecutors said yesterday they were charging Chechen man Lom-Ali Gaitukayev with organising the murder, and would bring new charges against the alleged hitman, another Chechen called Rustam Makhmudov.
New indictments are also being prepared against two of Makhmudov’s brothers, and a former Moscow policeman called Sergei Khadzhikurbanov. A former senior police officer named Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov is also accused of taking money to plan and prepare the killing.
Khadzhikurbanov and two of the Makhmudov brothers were earlier acquitted of Politkovskaya’s murder due to lack of evidence, but a higher court ordered a retrial.
“Now it is important that the detectives do not stop there, continue to dig in and identify, detain and prosecute those who ordered Anna Politkovskaya’s killing,” said Nina Ognianova of the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York.
“If they are able to do this, Anna Politkovskaya’s murder investigation will be a benchmark for Russia.
“It will be a benchmark in the fight against impunity in journalists’ murders in Russia because it will be the only case where a mastermind will ... go before a jury and be prosecuted.”
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe said yesterday that about 30 journalists had been murdered in its 56 member states in the last five years, and in only three of those cases had anyone been convicted.
