A RUSSIAN court yesterday acquitted all three men accused of helping murder Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of Kremlin power and a campaigning investigative journalist.
The jury said it found that Chechen brothers Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov were not guilty of acting as accomplices in the murder, and that former police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov was not guilty of organising the crime.
Politkovskaya, who published scathing exposes on official corruption and human rights abuses, was shot dead outside her apartment on October 7th, 2006 after returning home from the supermarket.
The murder of the 48-year-old mother of two provoked an outcry in the West and underlined concerns that freedom of speech was under threat in Russia. The Kremlin denied any involvement in her murder.
For some time there has been a pervasive sense that the trial was tangential, the evidence patchy, and that the Russian government had only skimmed the edges of the crime rather than dug at its roots.
Conspicuously missing from the courtroom was anyone accused of pulling the trigger, ordering or paying for the killing. Lawyers say evidence has linked the crime to the FSB (formerly the KGB), but has failed to reveal how far up the ranks of intelligence services the plan to kill Politkovskaya reached.
This trial was supposed to be a start; investigators said they were preparing a case against the missing mastermind and killer.
But many close to the case worry that the authorities have no appetite for a real investigation.
“They will mark the Anna Politkovskaya case closed. I’m sure that’s what they’re trying to do,” says Mourad Moussaev, lawyer for Dzhabrail Makhmudov, the younger brother.
Like many of the contract killings and much of the rampant corruption of today’s Russia, the trial has transpired in plain view, yet somehow out of sight. The yellow courtroom with draughty windows, claustrophobic wooden benches and no clock is a quiet epicentre in a turbulent country.
Beyond the walls, many ordinary Russians display no more than passing curiosity about who killed Politkovskaya, along with a handful of other journalists and lawyers who have been the victims of mysterious, long unsolved attacks.
She was shot dead at close range as she arrived home from the grocery store. Her columns, criticising then-president Vladimir Putin for creating an atmosphere of lawlessness and dredging up the sadistic underbelly of the Chechen wars, had irritated the Kremlin for years.
Putin famously complained that her death was even more damaging to Russia’s reputation than her investigative reports. Since then, the government has taken to blaming the killing on forces working from abroad to undermine Russia’s credibility.
The acquitted men open a window on contemporary Russia. They are alleged gangsters tangled together amid suspicions of racketeering, kidnapping and killing; tongues tied, critics complain, by a code of silence and the complicity of the security services.
A third brother has gone missing since the investigation began. He was named as the suspected gunman, despite surveillance camera footage shown during this trial showing a man who doesn’t appear to match his height or description.
“We have long ago been betrayed and sold by the authorities,” the policeman, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, yelled through the bars this week as spectators and lawyers filtered from the courtroom. “I swear I have nothing to do with this, nothing!”
In court this week Politkovskaya’s grown son and daughter listened intently. They only want the truth, they tell reporters.
When the accused’s lawyer, Karina Moskalenko, rose to make her final statement, her voice rang with indignation. She reminded the jury that Politkovskaya would never have forgiven them for finding an innocent man guilty.
Instead of rehashing the testimony, she spoke of Chechnya, saying that the two brutal wars in the breakaway republic had dehumanised Russians.
She discussed the officials chafed by Politkovskaya’s work and complained that justice was elusive in Russian courts.
She spoke disparagingly of the defendants, arguing that the Chechen brothers would have no motive to attack a journalist who publicised the suffering of their people. Instead, Moskalenko blamed “the system”.
“There is only one thing left,” Moskalenko told the jury. “To answer, honestly, to whom Anna Politkovskaya was undesirable.”
It’s a question that has haunted Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper where Politkovskaya worked. Deputy editor Sergei Sokolov has taken charge of the investigation.
The FSB was following Politkovskaya by the summer of 2006, Sokolov says. “Did they know there were gangsters trailing her, and if they did, why did they allow it? Why didn’t they prevent her murder? I have no answer. But their active tampering makes me think they’re trying to hide something.”