NYT : Journalist Critical of Chechen War Is Shot Dead

Journalist Critical of Chechen War Is Shot Dead

By C. J. CHIVERS | October 8, 2006

MOSCOW, Oct. 7 — Anna Politkovskaya, the veteran Russian journalist and author who made her name as a searing critic of the Kremlin and its policies in Chechnya, was found dead on Saturday in her apartment building, shot in the head with a pistol, the authorities and her colleagues said.

Ms. Politkovskaya, 48, was a journalist with few equals in Russia. She was a special correspondent for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper and had become one of the country’s most prominent human rights advocates.

In recent years, as the Russian news media faced intensifying pressure under the administration of President Vladimir V. Putin, she maintained her outspoken stance. And she became an international figure who often spoke abroad about a war she called “state versus group terrorism.”

She was a strident critic of Mr. Putin, whom she accused of stifling civil society and allowing a climate of official corruption and brutality.

She was found dead by a neighbor shortly after 5 p.m. A Makarov 9-millimeter pistol had been dropped at her side, the signature of a contract killing, Vitaly Yaroshevsky, the deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, said in a telephone interview.

“We are certain that this is the horrible outcome of her journalistic activity,” he said. “No other versions are assumed.”

In Washington, the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said the United States “urges the Russian government to conduct an immediate and thorough investigation in order to find, prosecute and bring to justice all those responsible for this heinous murder.”

The former Soviet president Mikhail S. Gorbachev, a shareholder of the newspaper where Ms. Politkovskaya worked, called her killing “a savage crime.”

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

Accounts about where she died conflicted, with some law enforcement authorities saying she was found inside the entrance of her apartment building and others saying she was in the elevator.

The police said a security video camera had recorded the image of her presumed killer: a tall young man in dark clothes and a black baseball cap. They said a search for him had begun.

Ms. Politkovskaya, who had two adult children, had worked for Novaya Gazeta since 1999, and covered the second Chechen war and the terrorist siege of a Moscow theater in 2002. One of her books, “A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya,” recorded her impressions of the war’s unrelenting and often macabre cruelty, and the manifest corruption of many of its participants.

She wrote of torture, mass executions, kidnappings to gain ransom and to eliminate rebel suspects, and the sale by Russian soldiers of Chechen corpses to their families for proper Islamic burial. Her writing cemented her place as one of the war’s most vocal domestic critics.

“The army and police, nearly 100,000 strong, wander around Chechnya in a state of complete moral decay,” she wrote. “And what response could one expect but more terrorism, and the recruitment of new resistance fighters?”

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has been one of the world’s more difficult and dangerous countries for journalists. The climate has continued in recent years; at least 12 journalists have been killed in Russia in contract-style murders since 2000, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

None has been solved, including the contract killing in 2004 of Paul Klebnikov, the American editor of Forbes magazine’s Russian-language edition.

Ms. Politkovskaya had received death threats in the past, and at least once had left the country fearing for her safety. In 2004 she claimed to have been poisoned while en route on an airplane to cover the public school siege in Beslan; she passed out on the flight but survived. Mr. Yaroshevsky also said that Novaya Gazeta had briefly placed her under protective guard a few years ago.

But as prosecutors opened an investigation into what they called premeditated murder, her colleagues expressed astonishment that she had been killed in such a fashion, saying her public stature had seemed to lend her an aura of invincibility.

“She was doing such risky things for such a long time that it seemed she had transcended the danger,” said Tanya Lokshina, chairwoman of Center Demos, a Moscow-based human rights organization. “I am ashamed to say it, but we all felt she was next to a monument, and that she was an icon.”

Ms. Lokshina said she had been with Ms. Politkovskaya two weeks ago in Stockholm, and that nothing seemed out of order. “She never spoke about any current threats,” she said. “Everything seemed quite normal. She seemed happy and never referred to anything suspicious.”

Mr. Yaroshevsky said that Ms. Politkovskaya had been at work on Saturday finishing an article for the Monday paper about torturers in the government of Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin premier of Chechnya. He said the story included evidence and pictures.

In an interview in April with The New York Times, Ms. Politkovskaya said she had evidence of torture in Chechnya by Mr. Kadyrov’s police and other gunmen, including at least one witness who had been tortured by Mr. Kadyrov himself. Mr. Kadyrov has always vigorously denied such allegations.

Mr. Yaroshevsky said there were no immediate theories about who might be behind her killing, and noted that it might be convenient for an enemy of Mr. Kadyrov to kill Ms. Politkovskaya in order to blacken the Chechen premier’s name.

The paper had been expecting her to file the article on Saturday night, he said, and she had apparently been killed after she left her apartment for a trip to a nearby store. The RTR television station reported that investigators believed that she had been followed throughout the day.