Natalia Estemirova murdered

On July 15, 2009 a prominent Russian human rights activist, Natalia Estemirova, has been found dead in the North Caucasus. She was bundled into a van and abducted as she left her home in Grozny, Chechnya around 8:30 a.m. Two witnesses reported they saw Estemirova being pushed into a car shouting that she was being abducted. Her body with bullet wounds in the head and chest area at 4:30 p.m. in woodland 100 metres away from the federal road "Kavkaz" near the village of Gazi-Yurt, Ingushetia.

Estemirova had been investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya for the independent Memorial group. n recent months, she had been gathering evidence of a campaign of house-burnings by government-backed militias.

Estemirova, who was 50 according to Russian prosecutors, had worked in the past with the activists Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead in 2006, and Stanislav Markelov, who was killed in January this year. In 2007 she was awarded the inaugural Anna Politkovskaya Prize, and had also received awards from the Swedish and European parliaments, Memorial said.

In a statement the group said she "was forcefully taken from her house into a car and shouted that she was being kidnapped" at about 0830 local time (0430 GMT).

In the run-up to her murder, Estemirova received threats from senior aides of the Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. In March 2008 Kadyrov summoned her to a meeting at which he expressed extreme dissatisfaction with her work and her opposition to his new edict forcing women to wear headscarves. According to Orlov, head of Memorial, Kadyrov told her: "Yes, my hands are up to the elbows in blood. And I am not ashamed of that. I will kill and kill bad people." Estemirova was unimpressed and she ticked him off.

Memorial claimed that "state terror" was to blame, calling the killing an "extrajudicial execution" by government-backed death squads. Memorial's chairman Oleg Orlov said that Ramzan Kadyrov threatened Natalya and that Russian president Medvedev is content with Kadyrov being a murderer.

Orlov said in a statement: "I know, I am sure who is guilty of Natalya Estemirova's murder, we all know him. His name is Ramzan Kadyrov."

Kadyrov denied any involvement and promised to investigate the killing personally. He condemned the killers, saying they "must be punished as the cruelest of criminals". Kadyrov responded by suing for libel, though in February 2010 he withdrew several of those suits.

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