Putin silent as fiercest critic is murdered

· Reporter was investigating torture in Chechnya·
Protesters blame Kremlin for apartment shooting

Tom Parfitt in Moscow
Monday October 9, 2006The Guardian

A crowd of protesters gathered in central Moscow yesterday to express their anger at the assassination of the crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who at the weekend became the 13th Russian journalist to be killed in a contract-style killing since President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000.

Politkovskaya, 48, had today been due to publish an article on torture and kidnappings by pro-Moscow forces in the restless southern republic of Chechnya, her colleagues said.

The prosecutor general took personal control of the investigation yesterday, but Mr Putin made no comment on the killing of one of the country's best-known public figures and his fiercest critic.

Politkovskaya, who won international acclaim for exposing the brutality of Russian forces in Chechnya, was shot dead in the lift of her apartment block in Moscow on Saturday. Police were last night hunting a man in a white baseball cap who was filmed by a CCTV camera entering the building a few moments before she was shot three times in the chest and once in the head.

The killing immediately threw suspicion on the security services and the pro-Moscow Chechen forces that control Chechnya. "You just have to look at the subjects of her latest work and there's your list of chief suspects," said Viktor Shenderovich, a well-known radio and television commentator, who joined the protest by several hundred people on Pushkin Square. In a reference to the KGB's successor, the federal security service FSB, Mr Shenderovich said: "The culprits will never be found, because the people who will be investigating this murder walk down the same corridors as those who ordered it."

Protesters carried placards reading "The Kremlin killed freedom of speech", and "Anna, great daughter of Russia".

Flyura Arslanova, a pensioner clutching a photograph of Politkovskaya and dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, said: "It's a tragedy. She was killed for being honest.">>>cont

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