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Anna Politkovskaya
Russian journalist
Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in October of 2006-executed, actually. Someone followed her into the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow, shot her four times: twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and a final shot to the head. The pistol, its serial number filed off, was left next to the body, the sign of a contract killing.
Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist whose fearless, behind-the-scenes coverage of the Chechen war had exposed human-rights abuses in Russia's southern province of Chechnya, where tens of thousands have been killed during two Kremlin campaigns. She documented not only the brutality of the conflict, but also the massive corruption and moral corrosion that was occurring at all levels and on both sides. She was not afraid to name names, and, on at least one occasion, to print the official's phone number, inviting her readers to register their disgust personally.
In the months before her murder, she had been focusing on the Moscow-backed, Chechen Prime Minister Ramsan Kadyrov. In fact, just two days before her murder, on KadyroV's thirtieth birthday, she made him the subject of her last radio interview. The date was significant because it marked the day Kadyrov met the age eligibility requirement to stand for the post of president. As evident in an interview with Politkovskaya ("Russia: Anna Politkovskaya's Last Interview," by Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty on October 9, 2006), she was well aware of this fact and of his aspirations when she chose to accuse him of torture.
Right now I have two photographs on my desk. I am conducting an investigation about torture today in Kadyrov's prisons, today and yesterday. These are people who were abducted by the Kadyrovtsi [members of Kadyrov's personal militia] for completely inexplicable reasons and who died...
At this point, the interviewer suggested that perhaps these were individual cases, representing only a small percentage of abuses. Politkovskaya responded in no uncertain terms:
I'd like to call attention to the fact that we talk about "individual cases " only because these people aren 't our loved ones-it's not my son, my brother, my husband. The photographs that I'm telling you about, these were bodies that had been horribly tortured. You can't reduce this to...