http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Vladimir_Putin.jpg

 

Is this man a murderer?

 

Is this man to be trusted?

 

how long will it be till Georgia is crushed and a more soviet land will return?

 

 

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, 2006

The Guardian

 

Protesters demonstrate against the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. Photograph: Dmitry Lovetsky/AP

 

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."

 

Eduard Limonov, a radical opposition figure, said: "It is Putin who has created this society of hate where journalists are murdered and other nationalities become the victim of Russian race supremacy."

 

Politkovskaya, a mother of two, had harried security officers, military men, and Chechnya's controversial prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, in numerous articles for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta which condemned the cruelty wrought against civilians in the conflict between pro-Moscow forces and separatist rebels.

 

She was widely admired for her courage and tenacity in uncovering stories that few other reporters dared to touch. Her books - A Dirty War: A Russian reporter in Chechnya; and A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya - brought her worldwide acclaim.

 

She was once arrested and subjected to a mock execution by security forces in Chechnya, and came close to death on another occasion in an apparent poisoning attempt. Yet she denied being particularly brave, saying in one interview: "The duty of doctors is to give health to their patients, the duty of the singer to sing, and the duty of the journalist is to write what this journalist sees in reality."

 

A spokesman for Russia's prosecutor general, Yury Chaika, told NTV that all motives for the killing were being examined, but "of course the main one we are looking at is the professional activity of the journalist".

 

In Washington, the US state department said Politkovskaya was "personally courageous and committed to seeking justice even in the face of previous death threats", but the Kremlin was silent. Mr Putin held a routine meeting of his security council, but did not mention the murder. The EU said Russian authorities should launch "a thorough investigation" into the "heinous crime" of her murder.

 

Novaya Gazeta placed a portrait of Politkovskaya trimmed with black on its website and announced a 25m-rouble (£500,000) reward for information leading to the capture of the people who ordered her killing. Its deputy editor, Andrei Lipsky, told the Guardian that Politkovskaya had been preparing an article for today's edition exposing torture of opponents by officials of the Chechen prime minister, but she did not manage to complete it before she was shot. "We are trying to piece together the fragments [from her notes]," he said.

 

Mr Kadyrov was asked yesterday to comment on accusations that his men carried out the killing. He replied: "Making assumptions without any basis or serious evidence means arguing on the level of rumours and gossip, and that flatters neither journalists nor politicians." He told the Itar-Tass news agency: "I want to underline that although Politkovskaya's material about Chechnya was not always objective, as a human being I am sincerely sorry for the journalist."

 

Outside Politkovskaya's apartment block on Lesnaya Street, mourners left carnations and candles close to a portrait of her placed on top of a post box.

 

Svetlana Khokhlova, 60, who uses a wheelchair, said she had travelled from the outskirts of the city to pay her respects. "She wrote about the forgotten people like me," she said. "She was sharp and intelligent and she wrote the truth. I'm ashamed of my country today."

 

Inside the building, the doors of the lift where Politskovaya was shot stood open, a single bullet hole just below head-height puncturing the steel back wall of the lift. Detectives went from floor to floor questioning the block's residents.

 

What she wrote

 

Anna Politkovskaya regularly commented on brutality by pro-Moscow forces in Chechnya. Here are some of her latest thoughts

 

21.09.06

 

In Chechnya there is a sharp lack of people who question themselves. They are mostly single-minded amoebas. For them to kill is like having a sip of tea. For such amoebas to understand a person presented to them as an enemy is impossible. And what does it mean "to understand" in Chechnya? To understand is to preserve somebody's life. That's the price of tolerance: there is no other. And many people still think that this game with an amnesty [for rebel fighters] is some kind of story about [Chechen PM Ramzan] Kadyrov's tolerance, about how he's saving the fighters and preserving the nation. It's lies. In fact, the fighters are tied in to yet more bloodshed - in order to keep them on his side.

 

11.09.06

 

What is Kadyrov syndrome? Its main characteristics are insolence, boorishness and cruelty masquerading as courage and manliness. In Chechnya the Kadyrovtsy [forces loyal to Kadyrov] beat men and women whenever they think it's necessary. They cut off the heads of their enemies in the same way as the Wahabis [islamic militants] did. And all this is allowed by the appropriate authorities and is even called officially "specifics of raising national awareness as a result of the final choice of the Chechen people in favour of Russia".

 

11.09.06

 

The world is afraid of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction - I'm afraid of hatred. Uncontrolled and building up. The world somehow came up with mechanisms to control the leaders of Iraq and North Korea but nobody can foresee how personal revenge works. And the world is defenceless against it. In our country there is now a rare and irresponsible stupidity. Hundreds of people are deliberately forced to keep their storage of hatred. What do we want from the Chechens sitting in prison for so-called terrorism? There are hundreds of people with long jail sentences ahead of them. They are hated and all the "special methods" [of torture] that come in to the heads of both their fellow inmates and the administers are tested out on them.

 

more info:

 

http://eng.kavkaz.memo.ru/

Absolutely... He is basically Central Europe's George W Bush....

 

These journalists who are being conveniently 'assassinated', no one is gonna tell me someone high up in the Kremlin isn't involved, probably acting on Putin's orders... This guy was in the KGB ffs..... <_<

here's the obit for people wanting to read it:

 

Obituary

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anna Politkovskaya

 

Crusading Russian journalist famed for her exposés of corruption and the Chechen war

 

David Hearst

Monday October 9, 2006

The Guardian

 

 

If one word sums up the life and work of Anna Politkovskaya, Russia's foremost investigative reporter assassinated at the age of 48, it is bravery. She could have chosen another life. Born and raised in New York, the daughter of Ukrainian UN diplomats, she was part of a Soviet elite that looked after its own. As a child, she had the best of both worlds: her parents could smuggle banned books out of the country, so she could write her dissertation about whomever she pleased. She alighted upon a poet shunned by Moscow, the émigré Marina Tsvetayeva.

 

She took from her background the social self-confidence that comes from rubbing shoulders with four-star generals round the kitchen table. But the earth was moving under the Soviet empire, and unlike many of her circle who saw perestroika as an opportunity to cash in their privilege, Politkovskaya moved instinctively in the opposite direction. After graduating in journalism from Moscow State University in 1980, she joined the daily Izvestia, before switching to the small independent press, first with Obshchaya Gazeta, then Novaya Gazeta.

She never saw herself as a war correspondent; indeed, Russia's first disastrous foray into Chechnya, from 1994 to 1998, almost passed her by. It is an irony of her story that the war she did not write about was brought to a halt by crusading journalism. Nightly reports chronicling the civilian cost of Russian artillery bombardments, broadcast on the independent television station NTV, had the same effect as the coverage of Vietnam had done on American audiences 30 years earlier. The Kremlin opted to sue for peace.

 

At the time, Politkovskaya was writing about state orphanages and the plight of the old: "I was interested in reviving Russia's pre-revolutionary tradition of writing about our social problems. That led me to writing about the seven million refugees in our country. When the war started, it was that that led me down to Chechnya."

 

By the start of the second Chechen war in 1999, the Kremlin had learned its lessons. The absence of reporting from the other side and lock-down on the battlefield put the Federal Security Service (FSB) in charge and set Chechen against Chechen. That was when Politkovskaya came into her own as a campaigning journalist.

 

She was in little doubt that Russia had been provoked. The relatively moderate wing of Chechen resistance, led by its former president Aslan Maskhadov, had run out of money. Into the vacuum swept money from the Wahabbis and foreign fighters like the Arab known as Khattab. When 9/11 provided an international parallel, it was only too convenient for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Shamil Basayev (obituary, July 11), a Chechen warlord who dreamed of creating a Muslim state across the north Caucasus, linked up with Khattab and invaded Dagestan, a fragile patchwork of Christian and Muslim tribes and part of the Russian Federation.

 

Politkovskaya agreed that Russia had to react. "But it was the way they did it," she said. "It was clear to me it was going to be total war, whose victims were first and foremost going to be civilian."

 

What followed was an excoriating series of articles and two books baring Russia's soul to the atrocities committed in its name - events like the "cleansing operation" of a village called Starye Atagi from January 28 to February 5 2002, and the shooting of six innocent villagers on a bus by members of a GRU military intelligence patrol, who then set fire to the vehicle to make it look as if it had been hit by rebel rockets. Politikovskaya always said she wrote for the future; indeed, court action about that incident grinds on to this day.

 

Her first book, A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya (2001), chronicled not so much what Russia was doing to Chechnya, but what Chechnya was doing to Russia. Putin's Russia (2004) described how new Russians got their money, through a combination of violence and old-fashioned thievery: it was to save the dying embers of democracy at home that she flew repeatedly back into the cauldron of the north Caucasus.

 

Politkovskaya had already used up several of her nine lives as a reporter. She had been locked in a hole in the ground by Russian troops and threatened with rape, kidnapped, and poisoned by the FSB on the first flight to Rostov after the Beslan school siege in 2004. She had acted as a negotiator in the Dubrovka theatre siege in Moscow in 2002, when 129 people died after the special services released gas into the building. In 2001, she had been forced to flee to Vienna. But she always came back for more, even at personal cost. Her husband left her. Her son pleaded with her to stop. Her neighbours, cowed by the attentions of the FSB in an upmarket street in central Moscow, shunned her.

 

For months she had been focusing on Ramsan Kadyrov, the son of a murdered Chechen president, who nurtured presidential ambitions himself. For some time, according to Politkovskaya, he had been telling anyone who would listen that her days were numbered. "The women in the crowd tried to conceal me because they were sure the Kadyrov people would shoot me on the spot if they knew I was there," Politkovskaya said. "They reminded me that Kadyrov publicly vowed to murder me. He actually said during a meeting of his government that Politkovskaya was a condemned woman."

 

In the last interview she gave, to the independent Radio Svoboda, Politkovskaya said she planned to publish in today's Novaya Gazeta the results of a large investigation into torture in Chechnya. The article was never sent. She is survived by her son Ilya and daughter Vera.

 

· Anna Politkovskaya, journalist, born 1958; died October 7 2006

 

These journalists who are being conveniently 'assassinated', no one is gonna tell me someone high up in the Kremlin isn't involved, probably acting on Putin's orders... This guy was in the KGB ffs..... <_<

 

well think he is someone you cant mess with. totally, but one thing is to lock someone up in Siberia on 'tax fraud' another is the bumping off of folk. no wonder all the rich oil barrons are all moving to London :lol:

 

Think Russia there will be no press freedom in russia in at bit. totally.

Putin is not directly a murderer unless you include his genocide and ethnic cleansing in Chechnya but the mafia are well and truly in control in Russia and Putin could stop the mafia tomorrow if he wanted but he does not want to as why should he when he is getting kickbacks from mafia bosses ? it is estimated that Putin has made $1.4bn while he has been president

yes yes yes!

looks like it...lol.

Yes,

 

Next question!

This is getting more and more like a John Le Carre novel by the hour.

And now what is it they've found traces of? Something called Polonium-210? Which apparently isn't available in the West and they reckon must have come from a nuclear reactor somewhere. :o

Putin is not directly a murderer unless you include his genocide and ethnic cleansing in Chechnya

 

Which I personally do by the way....

 

Which I personally do by the way....

 

 

lol.. thats like saying that ian huntley isnt a p**** if you ignore all those kids he abused!!! lol.

 

 

(in relation to craigs post)

if this did involve Russia, then isn't it like an act of war, or something similar, killing someone on our soil, and with radiation too.

 

Then another angle would a government be so sloppy as to use a radioactive material that could be traced.

Which I personally do by the way....

 

This made me laugh and want to post some sarcastic remark like "oh Scott how loosely you define murder" but... ****ing hell, the number of politicians that fail to equate murder with genocide, pre-emptive war, state-sponsored terrorism... It really is necessary to make clear your stance. So let me just say...

 

I, too, personally think genocide constitutes murder and someone who commits genocide is implicitly a murderer.

 

just so you know... :P

 

 

:(