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Monday, 08.10.2007
State Prosecution: Politkovskaya murder is solved
Moscow. The Russian State Prosecutor’s Office has declared that the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya has been solved. Those who carried out, and those who organised the murder have already been arrested.
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Chief investigator Petros Garibyan, of the investigative committee of the State Prosecutor’s Office, said, however, that there currently only existed ‘suppositions’ relating to who had ordered the slaying.
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He told Politkovskaya’s former employer, the anti-Kremlin Novaya Gazeta newspaper, that the authorities still had to establish the exact links leading from the killers to the instigator, in order to supply the incontrovertible proof a trial would require.
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Ten suspects detained
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Ten suspects have now been detained, and charges have been levelled against eleven persons in connection with the murder. Only the killer who shot Politkovskaya in her doorway has not yet been formally charged, said Garibyan.
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Two persons who were arrested in connection with the internationally notorious murder have since been freed, since they could prove they had no connection to the crime. These included a man who had lent the murderers his car without knowing what they wanted to use it for.
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Reticence regarding the instigator
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Garibyan said that investigators entertained an “astounding supposition“ about the instigator of the murder, but declined to add anything more.
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In September, following the first arrests being made public, State Prosecutor Yury Chaika insinuated that the Kremlin’s enemies abroad were responsible for the murder.
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He provided no proof for this thesis, obviously tailored for exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. A series of scandals then troubled the investigation: The names of suspects were leaked to the public, on the one hand, and on the other, arrest orders for a number of suspects were in fact related to charges not connected to the Politkovskaya case.
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Murderers presumed to be Chechen
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A number of Chechens were named as murder suspects. Shamil Burayev, who it is alleged organised the slaying, also comes from Chechnya, and is known as a politician there, who in 2003 even ran against the pro-Kremlin Achmed Kadyrov, himself assassinated in 2004.
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Another suspect Ukrainian?
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A day before the first anniversary of the murder, a ‘criminal authority’, i.e. mobster, from Ukraine was arrested in Moscow. The state-owned Rossiskaya Gazeta reported that the arrest of the 49 year-old was connected to the Politkovskaya case.
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(ld/rufo/St.Petersburg)
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