Deadly Russia

A year ago she was found dead in her block apartment in Moscow. It may be chilling coincidence that she was killed on Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, paid the highest price for reporting the truth.

On October the 7^th last year, 48-year old, Politkovskaya drove to a local supermarket. Her pregnant daughter had planned to meet her there but was delayed. As a surveillance camera later showed, Anna was not alone. A young woman and a tall, slender man have been following her.

Politkovskaya made her name reporting for Russia’s liberal newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. On the day of her murder, Politkovskaya had planned to file a lengthy story on torture practices believed to be used by Chechen authorities, editor of Navaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov said.

Anna drove home and parked her silver Vaz 2110 just outside the entrance of her apartment block. The entrance security system was in order. She carried two bags of groceries up to her apartment, on the seventh floor, in the building’s elevator and dropped them at the door. Then she went down to get the rest of the shopping. When the elevator opened on the ground floor she met her killer.

He shot her four times, the last shot was a control shot from inches away, in the head. A pistol was left by her side – the obvious hallmark of a contract killing. The gun found was a 9mm Marakov, known as the weapon of choice for Russian hitmen.

After her murder, President Putin claimed that Politkovskaya’s influence on political life in the country was “extremely insignificant” and that the consequences of her murder were in fact more serious for him than the “damage inflicted by her articles”. This is how he described a journalist who was recognized and honored with numerous international awards for her work, courage and commitment.

Anna often said that with a KGB officer as president, the least you could do was to smile sometimes, to show the difference between him and you.

A year later

Political opponents of the Kremlin can end up in jail, such as the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, only Iraq has claimed more journalists' lives than Russia in the past decade. Though, nobody is suggesting that Mr Putin had anything to do with the deaths.

Former Russian spy and author of a book critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin, Alexander Litvinenko, had publicly accused Putin of her murder. He was poisoned a few months later.

At the end of August, this year, the Kremlin proudly announced that it was close to solving Politkovskaya’s murder. Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika said that 10 suspects had been arrested, mostly Chechens, but also three former police officers and an employee of the domestic intelligence agency, the FSB. The case, Chaika told reporters, was as good as solved.

Chaika said plotters abroad had controlled a Chechen gang boss and several serving or former security officers in Moscow suspected of murdering Politkovskaya. He blamed conspirators interested in undermining President Vladimir Putin's authority and destabilising Russia.

Anna Politkovskaya’s son, Ilya Politkovsky, told Reuter news agency that Mr Chaika's announcement was politically motivated. A prominent journalists' organisation in Moscow - the Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations - has called the official version a fabrication. Also former associates of Politkovskaya were skeptical about Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika's murder plot theory.

And, within days many of the 10 arrested suspects had been released and the investigation had been severely compromised. The prosecutor’s office had failed to present a solid case against two men. Alexei Berkin, a bodyguard, and Oleg Alimov, a police officer, were freed the next day.

Sergey Khadjikurbanov, a police major with the Interior Ministry's organised crime unit, presented an astonishing alibi: he claimed that he was in prison on the day of the Politkovskaya murder. And another suspect, Pavel Ryagusov, a lieutenant colonel with the FSB, appeared to have been only marginally involved in the Politkovskaya murder. He was also released.

A petite woman brave beyond believe

“Anna published over 500 articles in the Novaya Gazeta. Almost each of them could have been the reason of her murder” – claims the Editorial Board of the Novaya Gazeta.

Politkovskaya was writing form the wrecked villages and shattered towns of Chechnya, talking to soldiers’ mothers, trying to find their sons’ corpses in military morgues. Anna constantly reported on “filtration camps”, where kidnapped Chechens, often teenagers, suffered torture, mutilation, rape and death.

She had been in Chechnya over 40 times. On one occasion she said: “I simply reported what I saw. I feel that it’s my professional duty - if you hide information, you have failed in your duty.” In the other interview she said: “Actions of authorities are supported by a huge propaganda machine. This machine has been able to create a picture of the enemy, this enemy living down south.”

She had no other life apart from her profession. Politkovskaya’s husband, Alexander, left unable to cope. She had been trough a lot but always came back for more. She had been locked in a hole in the ground by Russian troops and threatened with rape. On her way to Rostov, after the Beslan school siege in 2004 she was poisoned by FSB and nearly died.

Politkovskaya had acted as a negotiator in the Dubrovka theatre siege in Moscow in 2002, when 129 people died after the special services released gas into the building. A year earlier, she had been forced to flee to Vienna after receiving serious death threats.

During a conference on the freedom of press organized by Reporters Without Borders in December 2005, Politkovskaya said: “People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think. In fact, one can ever get killed for giving me information. I am not the only one in danger. I have examples that can prove it.”

She had piles of post and hundreds of phone calls, people were offering information, more often asked for help. They believed she could make a difference. She always tried, she said, to do what she could.

Deadly Russia

Over the past 15 years, Russia has become the third-deadliest country in the world for journalists, after conflict-ridden Iraq and Algeria, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. It is estimated that 47 journalists have been killed in Russia since 1992. More than half of them lost their lives after Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000. The majority of the murders have never been solved.

In the essay titled “Am I Afraid” Politkovskaya wrote: “People often tell me that I am a pessimist that I don’t believe in the strength of the Russian people, that I am obsessive in my opposition to Putin and see nothing beyond that.” And she concluded with words: “If anybody thinks that they can comfort from the ‘optimistic’ forecast, let them do so. It is certainly the easier way but it is the death sentence for our grandchildren.”

Shot, stabbed or poisoned, the journalists have two things in common: no one has been convicted, or in most cases even arrested, after their deaths. The Kommersant reporter, Ivan Safronov, is the most recent journalist to die in suspicious circumstances.

Despite falling four floors from a window in his Moscow apartment block, he did not die immediately. Witnesses say he tried to get to his feet after hitting the ground, but then collapsed for the final time.

The police say the death of the well-respected journalist, who worked for the daily Kommersant newspaper, has all the hallmarks of suicide - though they are willing to consider the possibility that he was "driven" to kill himself. But his friends insist he was not the sort to take his own life. Why should he?

In September The prosecutor’s office of Moscow Central Administrative District closed the criminal investigation because of 'an absence of foul play'.

END