Outspoken Putin critic shot dead In Moscow

Anna Politkovskaya

MOSCOW - Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, has been shot dead at her apartment block in central Moscow, according to police.

"According to initial information she was killed by two shots when leaving the lift. Neighbours found her body," a police source told Reuters. Police found a pistol and four rounds in the lift.

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.

"The first thing that comes to mind is that Anna was killed for her professional activities. We don't see any other motive for this terrible crime," said Vitaly Yaroshevsky, a deputy editor of the newspaper where Politkovskaya worked.

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.

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.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, a shareholder in Politkovskaya's newspaper Novaya Gazeta, described the killing as a "savage crime".

"It is a blow to the entire democratic, independent press," Gorbachev told Interfax news agency. "It is a grave crime against the country, against all of us."

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.

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.

"We have not got the article yet but we know that she had evidence and photos," Novaya Gazeta's Yaroshevsky said.

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.

"Why do I so dislike Putin?" she wrote in her book 'Putin's Russia' which was widely published overseas but not in Russia.

"I dislike him for ... his cynicism, for his racism, for his lies ... for the massacre of the innocents which went on throughout his first term as president".

In New York, the Committee to Protect Journalists described Politkovskaya's murder as a "devastating development for journalism in Russia".

"She was an intrepid and brave reporter who repeatedly risked her life to report the news from that region," spokeswoman Abi Wright said.

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 US journalist Paul Klebnikov in 2004.

- REUTERS