-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 28, 2007 8:29:19 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Russia Arrests Assassins Hired by Berezovsky, "Moles" in
Security Services
Russia suggests Berezovsky
behind journalist's killing
by Shaun Walker in Moscow
The Independent (UK), 28 August 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2901005.ece
Russian prosecutors have announced a breakthrough in the hunt for
the killers of Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading journalist and
prominent critic of Vladimir Putin, who was murdered last year.
Conveniently for the Kremlin, the finger of suspicion points
directly at President Vladimir Putin's main enemy, the exiled
Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky.
The announcement came three days before what would have been
Politkovskaya's 49th birthday, and almost a year after she was shot
dead in a hail of bullets in the lift of her Moscow apartment
building early last October.
The Russian prosecutor-general, Yuri Chaika, said at a press
conference in Moscow yesterday that 10 arrests had been made,
including the direct organisers, accomplices and the assassin himself.
Figures within the Russian Interior Ministry and secret services
have been arrested as accomplices to the crime, but it was hinted
that the mastermind of the murder was the oligarch living outside
Russia.
The person who ordered the crime, said Mr Chaika, was living
outside Russia and wanted to "destabilise the situation in the
country ... and return to the previous ruling system, when money
and oligarchs decided everything."
This would suggest either the London-based Boris Berezovsky, or the
former head of Yukos oil and gas company, Leonid Nevzlin, who lives
in Israel. The Kremlin and Russian authorities have long suggested
that Mr Berezovsky is behind the murder of both Politkovskaya and
Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent poisoned in London last
November.
Experts and former colleagues of the assassinated journalist
expressed satisfaction that arrests had been made, but scepticism
at Mr Chaika's conclusions.
"It's good that there has been progress in the case," said Igor
Yakovenko, secretary-general of the Russian Union of Journalists.
"If we believe everything that Chaika says then this is the end of
the sad tradition of the murders of journalists in Russia going
unsolved." But, he said, there were several doubts about the
allegations. "It's worrying that, even before the investigation has
been officially completed, they are pointing the finger at people
abroad," he said.
Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, the opposition
newspaper where Politkovskaya published her hard-hitting reports on
Russian politics and the conflict in Chechnya, expressed similar
doubts. "We have known about this for a while. We've worked
together with their investigation and we trust their
professionalism," said Mr Muratov. "But we are absolutely amazed
that they have openly stated they know who ordered the crime before
the investigation has even been completed."
Mr Muratov confirmed that a security services official had been
arrested, and revealed that the FSB security-service operative in
question was a Moscow-based lieutenant-colonel. "At this stage, I
don't want to reveal any more," he said. "Let's wait first for the
court case."
Mr Chaika stated that the killing was carried out by a Chechen
criminal gang operating in Moscow that specialises in professional
hits. He also linked the group to the killings of Andrei Kozlov,
the corruption-fighting banker who was shot dead last year, and the
Forbes magazine editor Paul Klebnikov, killed in 2004.
He refused to name the mastermind, but separately stated that
Russia's long-standing efforts to have Boris Berezovsky brought
before a Russian court could bear fruit soon, if the former
oligarch is extradited from Britain to Brazil, where he is wanted
on charges of financial irregularity, and from there to Russia.
If all of Mr Chaika's claims are to be believed, it would mean that
members of Russia's security services are under the command of
Boris Berezovsky. " The level of corruption in Russia can bring
many unpleasant surprises," said Gennady Gudkov, a former FSB
colonel and now a member of the security committee of the Duma, or
parliament. Mr Gudkov said he was certain the London-based exile
was behind the killing: "My information leads me to believe that
Berezovsky himself, or people controlled by him, are behind both
this act and many acts of terrorism."
Others were sceptical. "We have no guarantees the names of those
who really ordered the killing and the names of those who will be
accused of it will be the same," said a statement from Novaya
Gazeta's editorial team. "We have no complaints about the
investigative team. We're working together ... But we want to be
certain that nothing 'expedient', with no actual relation to the
crime, influences this joint work."
Many might wonder if it is a little too convenient that Mr Chaika's
statement neatly confirms the Kremlin's allegations from the start.
"It makes you wonder if we are dealing not only with an 'ordered'
killing but with an 'ordered' investigation too," said Mr Yakovenko.
Mr Berezovsky did not comment last night.
A passionate critic of Putin
* Born in New York in 1958 to Soviet Ukrainian parents - both UN
diplomats - Anna Politkovskaya graduated as a journalist from
Moscow State university and went on to report for the Soviet
newspaper Izvestiya for over 10 years. In 1999, she became a
national figure when she joined the relatively liberal Novaya
Gazeta, a paper which took a consistently critical line against the
Kremlin.
* She travelled regularly to Chechnya and the north Caucasus,
reporting especially on the deaths of innocent civilians caught up
in the war there with Russia.
* In 2002, she tried to help negotiate at the scene after becoming
one of the few journalists to enter the theatre in Moscow seized by
Chechen militants who held hundreds of people hostage.
* In 2004, she reported that she had been poisoned by a cup of tea
on a flight.
* In the same year, she wrote Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing
Democracy, a book attacking Mr Putin's human rights record. Her
final article was about pro-Kremlin militias operating a policy of
"Chechenisation" in the region. She was shot dead in her Moscow
apartment block on 7 October 2006.
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