Politkovskaya probe announces new charges

Russian rights activists and friends of Anna Politkovskaya yesterday marked five years since the anti-Kremlin reporter’s murder as investigators announced new charges against suspects in the killing.

The 48-year-old Politkovskaya was gunned down in broad daylight in her apartment building in central Moscow on October 7, 2006.

She was sharply critical of the then president Vladimir Putin and his strongman policies in the volatile North Caucasus.

Five years on, the mastermind of the murder is still not publicly known, and a long-running investigation has so far failed to secure any convictions.

But yesterday investigators carrying out a fresh probe announced that a suspect, Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, would be charged that day with carrying out the murder.

Citing “new evidence”, they said they believed the mastermind ordered Gaitukayev to carry out the murder and he then recruited others to plan and commit the crime.

In a major development, Russia last month charged a former senior police officer, Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, with helping organise the murder in exchange for cash.

“Everyone will get his due sooner or later,” opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, where Politkovskaya worked, said yesterday in a front-page tribute to one of its star journalists.

“We don’t want revenge – we want the fulfilment of a duty.”

The newspaper opened Politkovskaya’s office for the public to leave flowers, while Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov visited her graveside and her former colleagues were set to leave tributes at the murder site, spokeswoman Nadezhda Prusenkova said.