Anna Politkovskaya: The politics of murder

[struggle4progress]

September 01, 2007
A surprise series of arrests has renewed debate over the contract killing of the russian reporter
FROM JOHN FOLLET IN MOSCOW

... During her stint as a lead reporter for liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya wrote almost 600 articles, several books, and made numerous emotionally charged media appearances. Some 39 criminal cases were opened as a direct result of her work ...

SHE had had many narrow escapes in her eventful life, having survived an apparent poisoning, been held in a pit for three days without food and water, and receiving numerous death threats. But that afternoon there was no escape. The assassin slotted three rounds into her chest and completed his job by firing a "control shot" into her forehead, standard practice for hitmen in this part of the world, where the business of killing people for cash still thrives ...

After 10 months of virtual silence on the subject, Chaika called a snap press conference and said 11 suspects had been arrested in connection with Politkovskaya's murder. He went on to outline a plot that could have come straight from the pages of a John Le Carre novel ...

But observers also noticed one uncanny and troubling coincidence. Chaika's findings precisely matched Putin's own thoughts on the case, expressed a mere three days after Politkovskaya was shot dead, when he too suggested she was killed by external forces keen on blackening the Kremlin's name and creating instability ...

http://www.sundayherald.com/international/shinternational/display.var.1658523.0.0.php