Following The Acquittal
After all three men were acquitted of Politkovskaya's murder in February 2009, her children Vera and Ilya, their lawyers Karinna Moskalenko and Anna Stavitskaya, and senior Novaya gazeta editor Sergei Sokolov gave their reaction to the trial at a press conference in Moscow. In his comments on the end of the trial, Andrew McIntosh, Chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe's Sub-Committee on the Media and Rapporteur on media freedom, expressed frustration at what he perceived to be a lack of progress in investigating the murder, or the inability of the Russian authorities to find her killers:
Two years ago, in its Resolution 1535 (2007), the Assembly called on the Russian Parliament to closely monitor the progress in the criminal investigations regarding the murder of Anna Politkovskaya and hold the authorities accountable for any failures to investigate or prosecute. The closure of the trial yesterday can only be regarded as a blatant failure. I call on the Russian authorities and Parliament to relaunch a proper investigation and shed light on this murder, which undermines not only freedom of expression in Russia, but also its democratic foundation based on the rule of law. There are no excuses for these flawed investigations into murders of politically critical journalists writing against corruption and crime within government, such as the murders of Georgy Gongadze in Ukraine in 2000 and Paul Klebnikov in Moscow in 2004.
Before the trial ended, Stanislav Markelov, a lawyer who had investigated many of the abuses documented by Politkovskaya, was assassinated in Moscow on 19 January 2009 Journalist Anastasia Baburova, who was with Markelov at the time, died later of injuries sustained while trying to intervene. Baburova was a freelance contributor to Novaya gazeta, and Markelov represented the newspaper on many occasions. In November 2009, the first public results of the investigation into the double shooting suggested that the murders had no immediate connection to the Politkovskaya assassination.
More closely related to Politkovskaya's work as a journalist was the 15 July 2009 murder of Natalia Estemirova. A board member of the Memorial human rights society and one of Politkovskaya's key informants, guides, and colleagues in Chechnya, Estemirova was abducted in Grozny and found dead, several hours later, in the neighbouring Republic of Ingushetia.
All three murders highlighted the impunity with which such activists were being killed (see List of journalists killed in Russia). After the first killing, Novaya gazeta chief editor Muratov asked publicly for his journalists to be trained in self-defence, with firearms if necessary. When Estemirova's death was followed that August by the killing of two more human-rights activists in Grozny—Zarema Sadulayeva and her husband Umar Dzhabrailov—Novaya gazeta announced it could no longer take the risk of sending its journalists to Chechnya.
The Chechen authorities expressed their offence at this "slur". In an interview with Radio Liberty, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov voiced statements about Estemirova that contradicted his earlier expressions of public concern and regret. She was a woman, he said, who had "never possessed any honour, dignity or conscience".
On 5 August 2009, the prosecution service's objection to the acquittals in the Politkovskaya trial was upheld by the Supreme Court, and a new trial was ordered.
In August 2011, Russian prosecutors claimed they were close to solving the murder after detaining Dmitry Pavliuchenkov, a former policeman, who they alleged was the principal organiser. The following month Kommersant Daily reported that according to Pavlyuchenkov, he was acting on instructions from businessman and Putin critic Boris Berezovsky.
Read more about this topic: Anna Politkovskaya