Politkovskaya: Arrests and Apprehension

The Kremlin used the occasion of a planned Moscow commemoration for slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya to announce the arrest of ten suspects. All are accused of a role in the hit team – which included former and current members of the Interior Ministry and an officer in the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB – and none of actually ordering last October’s murder. A memorial ceremony is planned in Moscow on Friday to mark her birthday. She would have turned 49 Thursday.

Interfax quoted Politkovskaya’s boss at Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov, as finding the results of the investigation "very convincing and professional".

But, while Politkovskaya’s colleagues expressed confidence in the arrests, some also saw the makings of a political dimension to the news, for instance that the government might accuse Putin's political enemy, oligarch Boris Berezovsky, of being the mastermind of the murder. Here is the piece by Politkovskaya's newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, on today's events (it's the newspaper's own rough English translation).

Federal prosecutor Yuri Chaika fed that apprehension by saying that the murder was planned abroad. He also said that Politkovskaya knew the person who ordered her killing, and had met with him. She had met with Berezovsky several times in London.

Here are three reports:

Russia Today
Regnum.ru
bbc

In a televised meeting with President Putin and a followup news conference, Chaika outlined the murder, which occurred as she walked from the elevator of her apartment building. He said it was “carefully planned,” with two surveillance groups watching Politkovskaya. Evidence previously released, based on video from a surveillance camera near her apartment, showed a lone figure – apparently the trigger man – entering the apartment building and then walking out at about the time of the murder.

Chaika identified the leader of the hit team as the ethnic Chechen head of a Moscow crime group specializing in contract murder. Without providing the man’s name, he said the group had organized murders in Russia, Ukraine and Latvia. He said the same hit team may have been involved in the 2004 murder of Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov and the 2006 killing of central bank deputy chief Andrei Kozlov.

An FSB official identified the FSB suspect as Lt. Col. Pavel Ryuguzov. He is the only suspect whose name was released. The arrests were made from Aug. 15 through last Thursday.