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Anna Politkovskaya is killed

On Saturday, 7 October 2006 Anna Politkovskaya, the prominent Russian journalist and the Novaya Gazeta special correspondent , was assassinated. She was found shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block on Lesnaya street in central Moscow. Police said a Makarov pistol and four shell casings were found beside her body. Reports indicated a contract killing, as she was shot four times, once in the head.

Anna Politkovskaya was born in 1958, she graduated as a journalist from Moscow State University in 1980 and worked on the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya for more than a decade. In 1999, she joined Novaya Gazeta. She frequently travelled to Chechnya and the North Caucasus where her dispatches described some of the horror of a war where most of the casualties were civilians. She was famous in the West for her book The Dirty War, a collection of articles mainly about the second Chechen conflict which began in 1999.

In 2004, she was a joint winner of the Olof Palme Prize for human rights work.

In October 2002, she was one of the few people to enter the Moscow theatre, where Chechen militants had seized hundreds of hostages, in a bid to negotiate.

In 2004, she tried to go to Beslan during the school siege but fell ill with food poisoning on the flight there. It was strongly suspected a plot to incapacitate her.

Politkovskaya's last known article for Novaya Gazeta, published on 28 September, is a condemnation of pro-Kremlin militias operating in Chechnya as part of Moscow's so-called Chechenisation policy. In late August 2007, police arrested ten suspects believed to have been involved in Politkovskaya's murder. Russia's Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika stated that the plotters' aim was to start a crisis to destabilize Russia. The suspects included members of a Chechen organized crime group, an FSB officer and police officers.

On March 28, 2008, it was reported that the suspected killer of journalist Anna Politkovskaya was identified as 30-years old Chechen Rustam Makhmudov, a brother of Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudovs who have been suspected on complicity to the murder (both were arrested).

On June 18, 2008, the investigating committee at the Moscow prosecutor general's office announced that the preliminary investigation was concluded, and three people, Sergey Khadzhikurbanov (Interior Ministry official), Dzhabrail Makhmudov and Ibragim Makhmudov, were set to stand trial for murder. Another suspect, Pavel Ryaguzov (FSB officer, who was suspected of providing Ms Politkovskaya home address to the killer.), has been charged with lesser offenses, including abuse of office and extortion.