Moscow police trail journalist killer
Anna Politkovskaya was found dead in a lift in an apartment block in Moscow
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Sunday, 08, Oct 2006 04:26
Russian police hunting for the killer of an outspoken journalist have admitted that her anti-government stance may have been behind her death.
Deputy prosecutor Vyacheslav Rosinsky said that the killing of Anna Politkovskaya may be connected to the "victim's social or professional duties".
The 48-year-old mother of two was found lying dead with a pistol and four bullets next to her in a Moscow apartment block at 17:15 local time (14:15 BST) yesterday.
Local TV reports say that she was shot three times in the body and once in the head, while CCTV footage released to the public shows a man in a baseball cap following the reporter into the complex.
Ms Politkovskaya was a major critic of president Vladimir Putin's regime, notably his policy towards the disputed region of Chechnya.
She frequently wrote about alleged abuse of human rights such as torture in Chechnya for her own newspaper, the Novaya Gazeta. The deputy editor of the paper said yesterday that he suspected her anti-Kremlin views were related to her death.
Vitaly Yaroshevsky told the Reuters news agency: "Everything she wrote was on the edge. The first thing that comes to mind is that Anna was killed for her professional activities, we don't see any other motive for this terrible crime."
It is widely believed that during the Beslan school siege of August and September 2004, in which the Russian military failed to prevent the deaths of 333 hostages and police, the Kremlin poisoned Ms Politkovskaya, preventing her from covering the conflict.
Former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a shareholder in Novaya Gazeta, has dubbed the journalist's murder a "savage crime", while a statement from the US state department said: "The US is shocked and profoundly saddened by the brutal murder of independent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya."