Russia: Journalist murder trial begins

Subject: Russia: Journalist murder trial begins Mon Nov 17, 2008 10:09 pm

THE trial of four men charged over the 2006 murder of the Russian journalist and Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya has opened, despite the absence of the masterminds of the killing.

"We are beginning the examination of the case," Judge Yevgeny Zubov told the military court in central Moscow yesterday.

More than two years after Politkovskaya was shot dead, the authorities have failed to identify the hitman who pulled the trigger or those who ultimately ordered the murder.

"I don't have any hope that the name of the person who ordered the killing will be revealed," the journalist's son, Ilya Politkovsky, said before the court hearing.

"The people who will be tried don't have direct contact with him. It's a criminal group that did this for the money," he added.

Lawyers for the Politkovskaya family also fear the trial may be held behind closed doors on the grounds that one suspect is a former agent of the FSB security service, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.

"I hope the process will be open. I hope they will have sufficient intelligence to make it an open hearing," said a lawyer for the family, Karina Moskalenko.

In addition to a former FSB agent, Pavel Ryaguzov - who is suspected of providing Politkovskaya's home address to the killer - three other defendants are standing trial.

Two of them, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, are Chechen brothers accused of following her in her last weeks.

They are brothers of the man investigators say shot Politkovskaya in the stairwell of her apartment building in October 2006: Rustam Makhmudov.

Makhmudov has never been found and is said by investigators to have fled the country.

The fourth defendant is Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former police investigator from the Moscow police's organised crime unit.

The masterminds of the presumed contract killing have never been identified, despite a statement in October 2006 by the then president, Vladimir Putin, that Politkovskaya's killing was "an unacceptable crime that cannot go unpunished".

Politkovskaya, aged 48 when she died, was a writer of books and articles that fiercely criticised Putin, notably for abuses committed by Russian forces during the second Chechen war, which took place under his watch.

LNK

Russia: Journalist murder trial begins

Russia: Journalist murder trial begins

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