Livewire - Amnesty International blogging for human rights

Anna Politkovskaya - murdered on 6 October 2006. ©Katja Tähjä

Friederike Behr blogs from Russia

The trial into the murder of Anna Politkovskaya has come to a close. During the last month, the proceedings took many twists and turns.

Before the New Year, Anna Politkovskaya’s children had raised doubts about the list of phonecalls their mother was said to have made before she was shot on 7 October 2006. The list provided by the Federal Security Service (FSB) was missing at least two calls from her children.

In the New Year, perhaps thanks to the many media reports about this, a new list presented by the mobile phone company included these two calls. The company explained that the difference between the lists was due to technical reasons.

During the hearings in January, several relatives of the brothers Makhmudov (two of the defendants and a third brother, suspected to be the killer) stated that the person filmed leaving the house in which Anna Politkovskaya was just shot looks different from Rustam Makhmudov.

When Magomed Musaev, the lawyer of defendant Dzhabrail Makhmudov, asked his client if the man shown on the video had any similarity to his relatives, Dzhabrail Makhmudov answered that “he looks more like my brother Ibragim, not like Rustam, who was always a bit overweight.” Ibragim had been charged with helping the killer by providing information about Anna Politkovskaya’s movements from a shopping centre to her flat.

When Dzhabrail Makhmudov was asked by the lawyers about his life around the time of Anna Politkovskaya’s murder, he talked about having studied social sciences and writing his master’s thesis on the situation of internally displaced people  in the North Caucasus. Having been displaced himself for some time, fleeing the Chechen armed conflict towards Kabardino-Balkaria, the issue was close to his heart. He said he had not read articles by Anna Politkovskaya but he knew that she had written about the situation in Chechnya.

Dzhabrail also spoke about being ill-treated during the investigations. He admitted lying to the investigators and said he had done so after being put under pressure. He was visibly upset during that questioning and tried to hide his tears.

The following day his brother Ibragim Makhmudov was questioned. In contrast to Dzhabrail, it seemed Ibragim wanted to give the impression that he did not care about anything at all. He said that he could not remember what he had been doing in October 2006 or on what money he had been living. When he was asked if he had ever read an article by Anna Politkovskaya, he said: “How would I? I have not read anything at all”.

Lawyer Karinna Moskalenko tried for a long time to find out what Ibragim had been doing while living in Moscow. There was obviously some kind of culture clash between the energetic lawyer, who travels between Chita in Eastern Siberia and Strasbourg to defend her clients, and this man who it seemed spent days on end moving around town without a specific aim.

The way he answered questions lead to a lot of laughter among the journalists and a sharp comment from the representative from the prosecutor’s office, who felt it was necessary to remind the audience that we were gathering to find out about the circumstances surrounding a serious crime.

During breaks in the trial, the journalists tried to get answers to the many outstanding questions from the lawyers as well as from the defendants or officials from the prosecutor’s office, all of whom answered with great pleasure but the picture did not become clearer. During the breaks, everyone would comment on the latest reports of the trial in newspapers such as Novaya Gazeta or Kommersant and the defendants were given a copy of the newspapers, especially if they contained a photograph from the courtroom.

During one break, FSB officers Pavel Riaguzov and Sergei Khadzhikurbanov told the journalists they had been pressured during the investigation to make statements against exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky and Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.

In court, Pavel Riaguzov told the jury he had lied to the investigators, explaining that “as a law enforcement official, I had an interest in helping to solve any crime.” Judge Zubov asked him if he “always uses such methods [i.e. lies] to solve a crime”.

For those watching the trial, it was not easy to establish what was a lie and what was the truth.. Many doubts remained once the judge closed the court investigation on 6 February.

Before the jury took a decision about the guilt of the accused, lawyer Karinna Moskalenko made a passionate appeal to them, telling them about Anna Politkovskaya, about the work she had done and about her principles. The prosecution said the murder of Anna Politkovskaya was a contract killing taken out against someone those responsible regarded as “undesirable”.

Undesirable in whose eyes? Karinna Moskalenko read from several articles Anna Politkovskaya had written, asking who might have had a motive to kill her. The defendants? Did they have a personal motive to kill her? Whoever pulled the trigger, maybe they were just part of a plot thought up at a much higher level, and those who considered Anna Politkovskaya “undesireable” would have to be found somewhere else…

On 19 February, the jury took a decision to acquit all four defendants unanimously.