Colleagues say Russian reporter was assassinated
Michael Mainville, Chronicle Foreign Service
Sunday, October 8, 2006
(10-08) 04:00 PDT Moscow -- Two weeks after she said she had been poisoned on her way to cover the Beslan school hostage-taking story, Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya sat behind her cluttered desk and vowed she would not be silenced.
"There are people in this country who would do anything to keep me quiet," she said then, barely able to speak above a whisper because of her mysterious illness. "Of course it's frightening, but I've survived and I'll keep writing. I don't consider it anything heroic -- I'm just trying to do my job, to let people know what's happening in our country."
On Saturday, after nearly a decade of courageous reporting on what she called Russia's "dirty war" in Chechnya, Politkovskaya was shot to death in the hallway outside her Moscow apartment. She was 48 and a mother of two grown children, a daughter, Vera, and a son, Ilya.
Her killing sent shock waves across Russia and raised fresh doubts about media freedom under President Vladimir Putin. She was the 12th reporter murdered in contract-style killings since Putin came to power, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Colleagues in Russia said they had no doubt Politkovskaya's killing was connected with her work.
"There can be no other reason -- she died because of her duties as a journalist. This was a politically motivated killing," said Vitaly Yaroshevsky, a deputy editor at Politkovskaya's newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.
Yaroshevsky said that in the days before her death, Politkovskaya had completed a story documenting new cases of torture in Chechnya, which was to be published Monday.
Politkovskaya's body was found slumped in the hallway of the building where she lived in central Moscow. A Makarov pistol and four cartridges lay nearby.
Police quoted on state-owned Rossiya television said she had been shot three times in the body and finished off with a "control shot" to the head. Other reports said she had been shot twice.
"One version of her death is premeditated murder linked to the victim's social or professional duties," deputy prosecutor Vyacheslav Rosinsky told Rossiya. Prosecutors have opened a homicide investigation and were reviewing footage recorded by a security camera, news reports said.
Politkovskaya gained recognition at home and abroad for her relentless reporting of human rights abuses in Russia, particularly in the war-torn southern republic of Chechnya. Her reporting from there won her numerous international awards -- and many enemies.
In October 2002, she was allowed to enter the Moscow theater to negotiate with Chechen militants holding hundreds of hostages. She later devoted much of her reporting to that crisis, which left 129 people dead, most of them from a gas used by Russian special forces.
Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, a shareholder in Novaya Gazeta, said her slaying was a "savage crime."
"It is a blow to the entire democratic, independent press," he told Interfax news service. "It is a grave crime against the country, against all of us."
"She always took the side of the weak and persecuted. She was a person of completely fanatical convictions and unlimited bravery," Yulia Latynina, a journalist and friend of Politkovskaya, said on Ekho Moskvy radio. "This is a terrible day not just for Russian journalism, but for Russia."
Kremlin-backed Chechen President Alu Alkhanov voiced regret over her killing. "Though our views on what is happening in Chechnya were completely different, Politkovskaya was not indifferent to the Chechen people's fate," he told the Itar-Tass news agency. "I and my colleagues sincerely regret what happened."
Elegant, with large reading glasses and gray hair, she hardly fit the picture of a typical war correspondent. Yet her detailed and harrowing accounts of killings, tortures and beatings of civilians by Russian servicemen in Chechnya were considered some of the finest reporting from the region.
"My notes are written for the future. They are the testimony of the innocent victims of the new Chechen war, which is why I record all the detail I can," she wrote in her 2003 book, "A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya."
In 2004, she published "Putin's Russia" -- a highly critical political biography that accused the president of failing to shake off his past as a KGB agent. "He persists in crushing liberty just as he did earlier in his career," she wrote in the book's introduction.
Putin has been widely accused of stifling dissent and cracking down on independent media since coming to power. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists described Politkovskaya's slaying as a "devastating development for journalism in Russia." Amnesty International said it was "appalled by the murder" and called for a thorough and impartial investigation.
Politkovskaya wrote a postscript to "Putin's Russia" the day after the last high-profile killing of a journalist in Moscow -- the July 2004 slaying of the American-born editor of the Russian edition of Forbes, Paul Klebnikov. In it, she wrote that Klebnikov's killing reflected the worst of what Russia had become under Putin.
"Yes, stability has come to Russia. It is a monstrous stability under which nobody seeks justice in law courts which flaunt their subservience and partisanship. Nobody in his or her right mind seeks protection from the institutions entrusted with maintaining law and order, because they are totally corrupt. Lynch law is the order of the day, both in people's minds and their actions. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."