Hundreds protest at murder of Putin's fiercest critic

Silent demonstrators gather outside the Russian embassy in Helinski. Picture / Reuters

Anna Politkovskaya's intelligent bespectacled face stared back from a small portrait pinned up outside her Moscow apartment block yesterday.

Russia's most famous and controversial crusading investigative journalist was dead, cut down by two shots from a hitman's pistol.

One of President Vladimir Putin's fiercest critics would not be penning any more stinging critiques of a man she scathingly referred to as "a product of the country's murkiest intelligence service".

And perhaps more significantly she would not be exposing any more of the chilling human rights abuses committed in Chechnya, abuses she alleged were perpetrated by the troubled republic's Kremlin-installed leadership.

Politkovskaya, a 48-year-old mother of two, was murdered on Saturday, Mr Putin's 54th birthday.

Perhaps the assassin had a grim sense of occasion.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in Moscow's Pushkin Square.

"The Kremlin has killed freedom of speech," read one placard, while another bearing a photograph of Mr Putin proclaimed: "You are responsible for everything."

Ludmila Alexeyeva, chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, said the murder was political.

"People who tell the truth here get killed because nothing could be said to object to what Anya was writing about."

As the modest portrait outside her home slowly became a shrine to her extraordinary life, complete with flowers and flickering candles, Russia's prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, said he was taking personal charge of the murder investigation, a procedure reserved for the country's biggest crimes.

Novaya Gazeta, the liberal newspaper that Politkovskaya worked for, announced it was offering a reward of 25 million roubles ($1.4 million) to anyone who helps track down her murderers.

State television broadcast grainy footage of a thin, baseball cap-clad man thought to be the killer caught on CCTV.

But the image was of his back and police sources said the people who ordered the hit may have already murdered him to cover their tracks.

Mourners, journalists and other onlookers wandered in and out of Politkovskaya's apartment building staring grimly at a bullet hole at head height in the lift in which she was murdered.

Statements of shock and sorrow poured in from around the world but from the Kremlin and from Mr Putin there was an awkward silence.

Politkovskaya's relationship with the government was never easy as she openly called for Mr Putin to be replaced and begged him to remove Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed Chechen prime minister she accused of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering civilians.

Mr Kadyrov always denied the allegations arguing that his private army, the so-called Kadyrovtsy, were putting the war-riven republic back on its feet using legal methods and were trying to catch the shadowy forces responsible for a constant stream of disappearances.

But for Politkovskaya, the region and its complex vortex of violence was a vocation and she had made exposing official wrongdoing there her duty.

Had she not been gunned down, an article bearing her byline would have appeared in Novaya Gazeta today detailing allegations of torture and worse against the Kadyrov regime.

In the last interview she gave, on Radio Liberty two days before she was killed, she called for the Chechen strongman to be tried for his alleged crimes and said she was ready to appear as a witness in his trial.

She claimed to have photographic and documentary evidence of a specific case in which she said he was complicit in the abduction and torture of two people.

Her editors took the bold step yesterday of publicly naming Mr Kadyrov as a prime suspect on their website and said they had decided to conduct their own investigation into her killing.

"Today we don't know who killed her and what for. We can only put forward two main hypotheses," they wrote.

"Either it was Ramzan Kadyrov's revenge; she wrote and spoke a lot about his activities. Or it was done by those who want suspicion to fall on the Chechen prime minister who has just passed the 30-year-old threshold and is therefore eligible for the Chechen president's job."

Mr Kadyrov, a "Hero of Russia" and the Kremlin's point man in Chechnya, said he was shocked by the murder and urged people not to jump to conclusions before a through investigation had been completed.

"One cannot speculate and argue at the level of rumours and gossip," he said.

He called the killing a blow against freedom of speech.

"Politkovskaya's articles were not always objective," he said, "but it was her point of view."

Her murder will reinforce fears about the dangers that Russian journalists face.

It is the most high-profile killing of a journalist since the US-born editor of Forbes Russia, Paul Klebnikov, was gunned down in Moscow in 2004.

That murder, like that of almost every journalist killed to order since 2000 when Mr Putin came to power, remains unsolved.

The US State Department issued a sharp statement yesterday urging the Kremlin to do more to protect journalists.

"The intimidation and murder of journalists, 12 in Russia in the past six years, is an affront to free and independent media and democratic values," it said.

The European Union called on Russian authorities to launch "a thorough investigation" into the killing, which it described as a "heinous crime".

The French Foreign Minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, said in a statement: "This crime cannot go unpunished."

Politkovskaya was acutely aware of the risks she ran.

"People sometimes pay with their lives for saying out loud what they think," she mused in December.

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