Saturday, March 29, 2008

Killer of Russian journalist identified, court told

RUSSIA: The killer of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya has been identified and is being tracked down, Russian prosecutors said yesterday.

"The direct murderer of Politkovskaya has been identified. Every measure to search for and apprehend this person is being taken," prosecutor Vyacheslav Smirnov told a military court, according to the Russian news agency Interfax. The killer was not named in public.

Politkovskaya, who angered officials with her reports on human rights abuses for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was gunned down in the stairwell of her apartment block on October 7th, 2006.

Her killing provoked international outrage and focused attention on Russia's poor record in solving the murders of more than a dozen journalists since 2000.

Lieut Col Pavel Ryaguzov, of the federal security service (FSB), is suspected of giving Politkovskaya's address to the killers, and remains in custody with eight others, Interfax said yesterday.

Ryaguzov is accused of "establishing the abiding dwelling of Politkovskaya and giving this information to Burayev [ another suspect]", Interfax quoted the military court judge as saying.

There remains the question of who ordered the murder. In August, in what appeared to be a swipe at London-based oligarch Boris Berezovsky, the prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, said those behind the killing were abroad.

"More than anything, this killing is to the advantage of those people and structures that are deliberately trying to destabilise the situation in the country, change our constitutional order, create a crisis in Russia and turn us back to the old system of government, when everything was decided by oligarchs and their money," he said.

© 2008 Guardian Service

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times