A trial into the killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya opens today in a military court in Moscow, with the Kremlin critic’s supporters fearing it will shed little light on the case.
Despite protests from Politkovskaya’s relatives, the long-awaited trial is likely to be held behind closed doors because one of the defendants, Pavel Ryaguzov, is an agent with the Federal Security Service, the former KGB.
Ryaguzov is suspected of having provided Politkovskaya’s home address to her killers and has been charged with abuse of office. Three other defendants including a former police investigator will also be tried for the killing.
But the killer and whoever ordered her contract murder remain at large.
“We will demand that the trial be open. My mother was a journalist and I think it’s impossible to have ... a closed trial,” Ilya Politkovsky, the slain journalist’s son, said, adding that getting an open trial was “improbable.”
Politkovskaya, a crusading newspaper journalist and one of the few independent voices in Russia’s tightly-controlled media world, was shot dead outside her home in Moscow in October 2006 in an apparent contract killing.
She wrote her investigative reports for the bi-weekly Novaya Gazeta newspaper. Many of her stories concerned human rights abuses carried out by Russian troops and pro-Moscow militias in the war-ravaged province of Chechnya.
The alleged killer, Rustam Makhmudov, has never been found and is said by investigators to have fled the country. The person who ordered the contract killing has also never been identified and no motive has so far been mentioned.
“I don’t have any hope that the name of the person who ordered the killing will be revealed ... The people who will be tried don’t have direct contact with him, it’s a criminal group that did this for the money,” Politkovsky said.
The four men who face trial are: Ryaguzov, former police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov and two Chechen brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, who are accused of following the journalist in the weeks before her killing.
“Based on experience we know that this type of case is never resolved in our country. But it’s still positive that at least a part of the case has gone to court this time,” said Boris Tymoshenko of the Glasnost Defense Foundation.
Tymoshenko said there was “an absence of political will” to solve the case.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based media freedoms organization, ranks Russia as the third deadliest country in the world for journalists after Iraq and Algeria, with 49 journalists killed since 1992.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS