الاتحاد الكاثوليكي العالمي للصحافة- لبنان اوسيب – لبنان
The retrial of three men who allegedly helped murder Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya opens before a military court tomorrow in Moscow.
They are former Moscow police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, who is accused of helping to organise the contract-style killing, and two Chechen brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, who are accused of being accessories.
They are being retried because prosecutors appealed successfully against their acquittal by a jury last February. The fourth person acquitted last February, former KGB officer Pavel Ryaguzov, is to be tried for extortion in a related case in which Khadzhikurbanov is also implicated.
The possibility of new information emerging in the trial centres on the relationship between Khadzhikurbanov and a witness in the original trial, identified in a report in yesterday’s issue Moskovskiy Komsomolets solely by the name of Pavlyuchenko.
According to the newspaper, Khadzhikurbanov was rearrested shortly after his acquittal in February as a result of a complaint by Pavlyuchenko accusing him of blackmail. Pavlyuchenko, who supposedly carried out jobs for the secret services, claims that, shortly before Politkovskaya’s murder in October 2006, Khadzhikurbanov proposed to him that they should “work on the press.”
Khadzhikurbanov denies that he was referring to Politkovskaya and claims that Pavlyuchenko is trying to implicate him because he owes Khadzhikurbanov a lot of money. Reporters Without Borders thinks it is essential that the authorities clarify the facts of this case and combine it with the other one.
It is also important not to forget that the main protagonists of Politkovskaya’s murder will not be in court tomorrow. They are the alleged the trigger-man, Rustam Makhmudov (the brother of Dzhabrail and Ibragim), who is on the run and believed to be abroad, and those who contracted the killing, whose identity is still unknown. It is also not known what story prompted her murder.
The Russian justice system’s inability to punish those who use murder to silence critics and protect their interests just feeds the cycle of violence and serves as licence for the killers to continue killing.
One of the latest victims was human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, who was kidnapped in Chechnya on 15 July and was found shot dead in neighbouring Ingushetia a few hours later. She had been denouncing human rights abuses in Chechnya for more than 10 years and worked closely with Politkovskaya. Like Politkovskaya, she refused to be silenced by threats.
At the demonstrations in homage to Estemirova after her death, human rights activists asked, “Who will be next?” We may have to keep asking that question if impunity continues to prevail Russia.
Reporters sans frontieres 4/8/2009
