KEY POINTS:
Moscow is pointing the finger at one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's biggest opponents over the murder of a leading journalist.
Russian prosecutors hinted exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky may be the mastermind of Anna Politkovskaya's murder.
The Russian prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika yesterday announced a breakthrough in
the hunt for the killers of crusading journalist Politkovskaya, who was a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin.
The announcement came three days before what would have been Politkovskaya's 49th birthday. She was shot dead in a hail of bullets in the lift of her Moscow apartment building last October.
Chaika said at a press conference that 10 arrests had been made in the investigation, including the direct organisers, accomplices and the assassin.
Figures within the Russian Interior Ministry and secret services have been arrested as accomplices to the crime, but it was hinted that the mastermind of the murder was the disgraced oligarch living outside Russia.
The person who ordered the crime, said Chaika, was living outside Russia and wanted to "destabilise the situation in the country ... and return to the previous ruling system, when money and oligarchs decided everything".
This would suggest either the London-based Berezovsky, or former Yukos CEO Leonid Nevzlin, currently living in Israel. The Kremlin and Russian authorities have long suggested that Berezovsky is behind the murder of both Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent poisoned in London last November. Experts and former colleagues of the assassinated journalist expressed satisfaction that arrests had been made, but scepticism at Chaika's conclusions.
"It's good that there has been progress in the case," said Igor Yakovenko, secretary general of the Russian Union of Journalists. But, he said, there were several doubts about the allegations.
"It's worrying that even before the investigation has been officially completed, they are pointing the finger at people abroad," he said.
Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, the opposition newspaper where Politkovskaya published her hard-hitting reports on Russian politics and the conflict in Chechnya, expressed similar doubts.
"We have known about this for a while. We've worked together with their investigation and we trust their professionalism," said Muratov.
"But we're absolutely amazed that they have openly stated that they know who ordered the crime before the investigation has even been completed."
Muratov confirmed that a security services official had been arrested, and revealed that the FSB operative in question was a Moscow-based lieutenant colonel.
"At this stage, I don't want to reveal any more," he said. "Let's wait first for the court case."
Chaika said the killing was carried out by a Chechen criminal gang operating in Moscow that specialises in professional hits. He also linked the group to the killings of Andrei Kozlov, the corruption-fighting banker who was gunned down last year, and Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov, murdered in 2004.
He refused to name the mastermind, but separately stated that Russia's long-standing efforts to have Boris Berezovsky brought before a Russian court could bear fruit soon, if the former oligarch is extradited from Britain to Brazil, where he is wanted on charges of financial irregularity, and from there to Russia.
If all Chaika's claims are to be believed, it would mean that current members of Russia's security services are under the command of Berezovsky.
"Unfortunately, the level of corruption in Russia can bring many unpleasant surprises," said Gennady Gudkov, a former FSB colonel and now a member of the Duma's security committee. He was certain that the London-based exile was behind the killing.
"My information, and the information I have received from my colleagues leads me to believe that Berezovsky himself, or people controlled by him, are behind both this act and many acts of terrorism in Russia, including the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings and the Nord-Ost theatre siege," he said.
But others expressed heavy scepticism at the Berezovsky link.
"We have no guarantees that the names of those who really ordered the killing and the names of those who will be accused of it will be the same," said a statement from Novaya Gazeta's editorial team posted on the newspaper's website.
"It makes you wonder if we are dealing not only with an 'ordered' killing but with an 'ordered' investigation too," said Yakovenko.
Berezovsky did not comment.
- Independent