Putin silent as fiercest critic is murdered

Protesters have taken to the streets of Russia over the contract style killing of crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the thirteenth journalist to be killed since Putin came to power. She was due to publish an article today about torture and killings by pro-Moscow forces working in Chechnya.

The prosecutor General has announced an immediate enquiry, but Mr Putin has made no comment.

Politkovskaya, who won international acclaim for exposing the brutality of Russian forces in Chechnya, was shot dead in the lift of her apartment block in Moscow on Saturday. Police were last night hunting a man in a white baseball cap who was filmed by a CCTV camera entering the building a few moments before she was shot three times in the chest and once in the head.

The killing immediately threw suspicion on the security services and the pro-Moscow Chechen forces that control Chechnya. "You just have to look at the subjects of her latest work and there's your list of chief suspects," said Viktor Shenderovich, a well-known radio and television commentator, who joined the protest by several hundred people on Pushkin Square. In a reference to the KGB's successor, the federal security service FSB, Mr Shenderovich said: "The culprits will never be found, because the people who will be investigating this murder walk down the same corridors as those who ordered it."

The courage of Politkovskaya was being widely discussed yesterday, along with the fact that she has survived other attempts to take her life.

She was once arrested and subjected to a mock execution by security forces in Chechnya, and came close to death on another occasion in an apparent poisoning attempt. Yet she denied being particularly brave, saying in one interview: "The duty of doctors is to give health to their patients, the duty of the singer to sing, and the duty of the journalist is to write what this journalist sees in reality."

A spokesman for Russia's prosecutor general, Yury Chaika, told NTV that all motives for the killing were being examined, but "of course the main one we are looking at is the professional activity of the journalist".

In Washington, the US state department said Politkovskaya was "personally courageous and committed to seeking justice even in the face of previous death threats", but the Kremlin was silent.

The outpouring of grief following her death is unprecedented, and has led to even Chechnya's controversial prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, - who had many times felt the heat of her investigative journalism- to express his condolences:

"Making assumptions without any basis or serious evidence means arguing on the level of rumours and gossip, and that flatters neither journalists nor politicians." He told the Itar-Tass news agency: "I want to underline that although Politkovskaya's material about Chechnya was not always objective, as a human being I am sincerely sorry for the journalist."

Here are some examples of her journalism:

11.09.06

What is Kadyrov syndrome? Its main characteristics are insolence, boorishness and cruelty masquerading as courage and manliness. In Chechnya the Kadyrovtsy [forces loyal to Kadyrov] beat men and women whenever they think it's necessary. They cut off the heads of their enemies in the same way as the Wahabis [Islamic militants] did. And all this is allowed by the appropriate authorities and is even called officially "specifics of raising national awareness as a result of the final choice of the Chechen people in favour of Russia".

11.09.06

The world is afraid of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction - I'm afraid of hatred. Uncontrolled and building up. The world somehow came up with mechanisms to control the leaders of Iraq and North Korea but nobody can foresee how personal revenge works. And the world is defenceless against it. In our country there is now a rare and irresponsible stupidity. Hundreds of people are deliberately forced to keep their storage of hatred. What do we want from the Chechens sitting in prison for so-called terrorism? There are hundreds of people with long jail sentences ahead of them. They are hated and all the "special methods" [of torture] that come in to the heads of both their fellow inmates and the administers are tested out on them.

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tag: Putin, Russia, Journalist, murdered, Anna, Politkovskaya