Moscow - A new trial into the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya opens in Moscow Wednesday, with the recent murder of her one-time associate having placed the spotlight firmly back on the case. The retrial comes after the Supreme Court agreed in June to an appeal from the state prosecutor's office to overturn the February 19 acquittal verdict, reached by a lower Moscow court. That jury had agreed with defence claims of insufficient evidence tying the four suspects to the crime.
Politkovskaya, a Kremlin critic, was gunned down in a contract- style killing in her Moscow apartment block in October 2006. Many people in Russia believe that the killing of the former Novaya Gazeta journalist was politically motivated due to her critical reporting of the human rights situation in Chechnya. The abduction and murder of Politkovskaya's former colleague and human rights activist Natalya Estemirova in mid-July has again cast the spotlight on the journalist's murder. The two had worked closely in probing allegations of crimes against the civilian population of Chechnya.
Estemirova's body was found by the roadside in neighbouring Ingushetia after she was abducted from a street in the volatile republic's capital Grozny on July 15. She had been shot, execution- style. Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has defended himself against accusations by the Russian rights group for which Estemirova had worked, Memorial, that he had ordered the activist's killing.
In the initial trial into Politkovskaya's murder, prosecutors had accused two Chechen brothers Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov of being accomplices and former police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov of helping the killer get away. The fourth defendant, Pavel Ryaguzov, was acquitted in a separate case. Ryaguzov, an agent of Russia's FSB security service, was accused of providing the killer with Politkovskaya's address.
Trial issues are to be clarified at Wednesday's hearing, according to Politkovskaya's family. No new evidence was expected in court.
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Russia’s failure to convict those behind the murder of journalists creates a climate of impunity that increases the peril of such work, the editor of slain reporter Anna Politkovskaya said yesterday.
“This atmosphere of impunity is responsible for the number of crimes against journalist,” Dmitry Muratov, the editor-and-chief of Novaya Gazeta, the paper for which Politkovskaya worked, told journalists in Moscow. His comments came a day before the start of a new trial over the murder of the investigative reporter.
But Politkovskaya’s friends and relatives say the hearings - ordered after the supreme court annulled a February acquittal of the suspects accused in her 2006 murder - are fundamentally flawed and a new investigation is needed. The men on trial are all accused of being accessories to the murder, but the authorities have still failed to find the triggerman, let alone identify the mastermind of the killing.
“The situation is paradoxical in Russia: the assassins of journalists feel socially closer to power than journalists themselves,” Muratov said. The murders may even feel they are acting in the state’s interest, he said, pointing to the psychology of the man jailed for the 2002 killing of another Novaya Gazeta journalist Sergei Zolovkin. The convicted assassin wrote to then-president Vladimir Putin for a pardon arguing he had served Russia’s interest by eliminating a traitor, he said.
Politkovskaya wrote dozens of articles for Novaya Gazeta and a book called ‘Putin’s Russia’, accusing Putin of strangling democracy and detailing horrific abuses during the Kremlin’s war in Chechnya. She was gunned down in the stairwell of her apartment building on October 7, 2006. Her unsolved murder was once more brought into sharp focus last month with the abduction and killing of her close colleague Natalya Estemirova, a prominent rights activist in Chechnya.