RUSSIA: Outspoken Putin critic shot dead in Moscow

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, was shot dead on Saturday (October 7) at her apartment block in central Moscow, police said. Police said that she was killed by two shots when leaving the lift. Neighbours found her body. Politkovskaya, a 48-year-old mother of two, won international fame and numerous prizes for her dogged pursuit of rights abuses by Putin's government, particularly in the violent southern province of Chechnya. Moscow chief prosecutor Yuri Syomin told reporters at the crime scene, a nine-storey Soviet-era apartment building in central Moscow, that he was treating the death as murder. "Moscow prosecutor's office opened a criminal case on the murder of a public figure. Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya's body was found in the building with the address on Lesnaya street. We are checking the murder site at the moment, the investigation team is at work. We can say so far that she was killed with a gun which was found with four cartridges. The general prosecutor's office representatives are also involved in the investigations." Paramedics took Politkovskaya's body, wrapped in a white sheet, out of the building and put it into an ambulance. A middle-aged women laid flowers at the doors of the building and then stood with her head against the wall, crying. In the days before her death, Politkovskaya had been working on a story about torture in Chechnya, which was expected to be published on Monday, her newspaper said. "I think this is a very serious political event, because she was a very famous journalist who devoted all of her life to fight against the Chechen war and now, for some reason, suddenly her life has been stopped. It is devastating for the whole journalist community at first, because what becomes clear is that we can speak less and less open about what we think and how we feel," said journalist Anna Sadovnikava. The rebel province has been a constant headache for the Kremlin. Russia sent troops in 1994 to crush an insurgency but after 12 years of bloodshed and the devastation of the province's capital Grozny, sporadic attacks continue. Politkovskaya was a fierce critic of Putin, whom she believed had failed to shake off his past as a KGB agent. She accused him of crushing liberty, stifling freedom and dragging Russia back into its authoritarian Soviet past. Born to Soviet Ukrainian diplomats in New York in 1958, Politkovskaya studied journalism at Moscow's State University and began her career in state media. After the collapse of the Soviet Union she began working at the independent media which began to flourish under Gorbachev. Politkovskaya's war reporting often meant she was under scrutiny by Russian politicians and, sometimes, the security services. She had been arrested and held in a pit for three days in Chechnya and received numerous death threats. She alleged she was unable to cover the bloody siege of a school at Beslan in 2004 -- in which more than 330 children and parents died when troops stormed the school - because she was poisoned on the flight from Moscow and ended up in hospital. Her murder is the most high-profile killing of a journalist here since the death of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov in 2004.

ITN Source | October 8, 2006

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