Anna Politkovskaya
A police officer sought by authorities in connection with the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative reporter who uncovered abuses against civilians in Chechnya, denied allegations of his involvement in the murder, according to an interview published Saturday, The Associated Press reports.
Alexander Prilepin told the government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta that he and his colleagues had been angered by Politkovskaya’s reports, which he called unfounded, but added that he had never thought about taking revenge.
Politkovskaya, who exposed killings, torture and other abuses against civilians in Chechnya, was gunned down in an apparent contract killing in her apartment building in Moscow on Oct. 7. The gunmen have not been found and the murder set off a chorus of protest from foreign governments and international organizations.
Russian news reports said that investigators traveled to the Siberian region of Khanty-Mansiisk, about 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) east of Moscow, to check the allegations that Prilepin and another police officer wanted for alleged crimes in Chechnya could have been involved in Politkovskaya’s murder.
Following a series of Politkovskaya’s articles exposing police atrocities in Chechnya, one of the officers whom she accused of abuses, Sergei Lapin, was implicated in e-mail threats against the journalist. In 2001, Politkovskaya fled to Vienna after receiving warnings that Lapin was intent on revenge.
Lapin was detained in 2002 and later sentenced to 11 years in prison by a court in Chechnya.
Prilepin, speaking to Rossiiskaya Gazeta from an undisclosed location, insisted that neither he nor colleagues of his who are also being sought by authorities had nothing to do with Politkovskaya’s murder.
“I wouldn’t conceal that most of my comrades, who had been in Chechnya and lost their friends and colleagues there, had been angered by the media providing ideological support for the rebels and casting us as butchers,” Prilepin said in a reference to Politkovskaya’s articles. “But no one has ever had any plans to take revenge on journalists. Moreover, it’s completely unclear why we should remember the old grievances now and decide to take revenge after so many years.”
Prilepin said he had been hiding from the authorities not because he was guilty, but because he feared a biased trial in Chechnya at the hands of local Kremlin-backed authorities.
Last week also saw a former security service officer claim that he might have been poisoned by a man who had sought to meet him, saying he had documents related to the death of the journalist, The Moscow Times reported Monday.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former Federal Security Service officer who has been granted asylum in Britain, was quoted by the British Broadcasting Corporation on Saturday as saying the documents contained the name of an individual who might have been related to the killing of Politkovskaya.
Litvinenko said he met the man and took the documents from him at a London restaurant on Nov. 1. Several hours later, Litvinenko felt sick and was hospitalized with symptoms suggestive of poisoning. The former officer said he would hand over the documents to police and to Novaya Gazeta when he recovered.Who Poisoned Alexander Litvinenko?
Anna Politkovskaya, the daughter of Soviet UN diplomats, was born in New York in 1958. She studied Journalism at Moscow University and worked for various newspapers such as "Izvestia" and after the fall of Communism for independent papers, among them "Obchtchaya Gazeta". Most recently she was a special correspondent for the small opposition paper "Novaya Gazeta". Politkovskaya had been working for this newspaper since 1999, when Putin became Prime Minister and the so-called second Chechen war began: two closely-tied events which would trigger a disastrous chain of developments, as Politkovskaya demonstrated in her articles and books such as "A Small Corner of Hell" and "Putin's Russia".
The North Caucasus mountain region of Chechnya proclaimed its independence from Russia in 1991, and finally obtained it through the peace treaty set up after the first war (during which the media could still report freely). From the Russian side, the independence of the secessionist Kazakhs was perceived as a defeat, if not as a bitter dishonor. In 1999, when a Chechen commando led by the rivals of the then president Maskhadov fell in Dagestan, in Russian territory, the Russian rule of the North Caucasus seemed imperiled. Shortly afterwards two bloody bomb attacks were carried out in Moscow. The Chechens were immediately accused as the perpetrators – a suspicion which to this day has yet to be confirmed. Putin, then the head of the KGB's succeeding organization the FSB, reacted with an "Anti-Terror Operation": the start of the second Chechen war. As response to Russia's humiliation and with the pledge to bring back former greatness, Putin used the war for his own political advancement. In 2000 he was elected as President of the Russian Federation.
Since then organizations such as Reporters Without Borders have observed a growing dissolution of free and independent media in Russia. Economic networks with ties to the Kremlin exercising tremendous influence, bureaucratic obstructions and a general climate of menace have seen to it that Russia numbers 140 (from 167) on the "RWB ranking list of worldwide positions of freedom of the press". Now as before, no freedom of coverage from Chechnya is possible.
Ever since the attacks on New York's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 Putin has felt part of an international alliance. He associated himself with Bush's propagandized "War on Terror". That same year the war in Chechnya was declared officially over. "Putin's begun to try to prove on the world stage," claimed Anna Politkovskaya in an interview in The Guardian, "that he's just a part of a fashionable war. And he's been successful. When, after Beslan, he began to state that we were seeing virtually the hand of Bin Laden, it was appalling. What's Bin Laden got to do with it?"
With all her reporting Politkovskaya tried to show how the war was far from over, but rather how acts of violence and human rights violations continued unabated. She focused above all on the civil population which was slowly being torn between the two warring parties, and described self-perpetuating cycles of violence. Her depictions shed light on the perverse mechanisms of war, exposing the terms on which they operate, while condemning the beneficiaries.
She ends her final book with a critique directed towards both deceptive political groups and society: "They always say only 'Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda'. A cursed slogan. It is the easiest thing to say, the answer with which to brush aside every new bloody tragedy. It is also the most primitive, with which one can lull the consciousness of a society, one which dreams of being lulled." (from "Putin's Russia")
Politkovskaya was awarded many foreign prizes for her work. In 2003 she received the first "Lettre Ulysses Award" for best reportage as well as the Hermann Kesten Medal. In 2004 she was given the Olaf Palme Prize, and one year later the Prize for Freedom and Future of the Press. In Russia she was awarded the Prize of the Journalists Union in 2001. In her native country, however, she also faced threats and intimidation. Yet she refused to have a bodyguard in the same way she refused to go into exile. In 2004 she was the victim of a poisoning attempt. On October 7, 2006 she was shot by an unknown gunman in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment block. The documents used for her last article have gone missing. Anna Politkovskaya left behind two children.
Chechen Republic Online - All About Chechnya
Human Rights Watch: Europe and Central Asia
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