In a full confession that will shorten his own future prison sentence, Dmitri Pavlyuchenkov admitted that he was guilty of aiding in the organization of the murder but was not the main organizer himself. Pavlyuchenkov had originally been maintaining his innocence since his arrest late August.

Now, with new evidence from the ex-lieutenant colonel, investigators say that the main suspect in the primary organizing role is Chechen businessman Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, currently sitting out a 15-year prison sentence in Ukraine for organizing the attempted murder of businessman Gennady Korban in March 2006.

According to Kommersant, investigators believe that Gaitukayev received an order in July 2006 from an “unidentified figure” to murder Politkovskaya. He then organized a hit team made up of his two nephews, Ibragim and Rustam Makhmudov, as well as Pavlyuchenkov. However, Gaitukayev was arrested the next month in Moscow on an arrest warrant from Ukraine, where he was later convicted of organizing the Korban murder attempt.

Without their primary organizer, the hit team spent some time lying in wait before being taken over by Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former Moscow police officer. At the time, Khadzhikurbanov had just been released from prison, where he served a term for abuse of authority. Investigators say that he and the other members of the group were given orders by cell phone from Gaitukayev in his detention facility.

Pavlyuchenkov admits that he ordered his subordinate officers to spy on the Politkovskaya and determine the pattern of her daily movements around the city. He then gave this information – along with the murder weapon – to the Makhmudov brothers. On October 7, 2006, Rustam Makhmudov shot and killed the journalist in her apartment building’s elevator.

Notably, Gaitukayev had previously stated that Anna Politkovskaya’s murder could have been no less than a $2 million job, although he denied having any involvement in it himself. Federal prosecutors say that they no charges are currently being filed against Gaitukayev and his lawyer declined to comment.

Kommersant added that it has information that Pavlyuchenkov has provided investigators with the name of the possible “client” in the case – said to be currently abroad – who paid Gaitukayev and the hit team. Federal investigators and the ex-lieutenant colonel declined to discuss the issue.

Khadzhikurbanov’s lawyer, Aleksei Mikhalchik, told Kommersant that Pavlyuchenkov was simply providing false evidence to ease his own fate. “I hope the investigation doesn’t rely on his words alone,” he said.

Novaya Gazeta Editor-in-Chief Sergei Sokolov commented that Lom-Ali Gaitukayev is not the sort of person who “talks with investigators” and therefore is unlikely to confirm Pavlyuchenkov’s testimony about the alleged client.

Politkovskaya’s death catapulted Russia into the spotlight as one of the world’s deadliest countries for reporters. Over the past five years, blame has been cast at Chechen militants, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, Russian then-President Vladimir Putin, and Russian police officers, among others. But today, Russia’s Investigative Committee announced that ex-Lieutenant Colonel Dmitri Pavlyuchenkov had been arrested as the suspected organizer of the journalist’s murder.

Investigators say that Pavlyuchenkov, who was at one point a main witness in the Politkovskaya case, was paid to organize the hit and even provided the criminal group in question with the murder weapon.

An answer to the larger question of who paid Pavlyuchenkov also may be close at hand, as the Investigative Committee additionally announced that it had information regarding the murder’s “client.” According to RIA Novosti, the name of the suspect is under wraps for now in order to prevent complications with the investigation.

Editors at Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper where Politkovskaya worked, said the news matched up with the results of their own independent investigation.

“In regards to the client, I do know of a few versions that federal investigators have developed at various levels of detail. They partially overlap with our own,” Novaya Gazeta Editor-in-Chief Sergei Sokolov told Gazeta.ru. “But to name any specific names right now would be irresponsible.”

At the very least, Novaya Gazeta’s investigation found that Pavlyuchenkov definitely played a key role in organizing the murder, said Sokolov. “I can’t say if he was the only organizer; there could have been two. But that this man was one of the main organizers and used his position [to ensure the murder was carried out] can already be confirmed,” he explained.

According to Gazeta.ru, the journalist’s children came to the conclusion that Pavlyuchenkov was involved in the murder “long ago.”

“We and Novaya Gazeta, as victims, carried out our own research, collected evidence in the case and more and more came to the conclusion that he was involved in the crime and should not take the stand as a witness,” said Anna Stavitskaya, lawyer for Ilya and Vera Politkovskaya.

For more information about the developments and background in the Politkovskaya case, see Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

In honor of Politkovskaya, memorial events were held on Thursday throughout Russia. At a rally in Moscow, more than 500 people gathered with candles and photographs of the murdered journalist to pay their respects. A variety of journalists, editors, oppositionists, human rights activists, and cultural figures spoke at the event. Among them were rights activists Lev Ponomarev and Sergei Kovalev, journalist Natella Boltyanskaya, Solidarity opposition movement co-leaders Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov, and Editor-in-Chief Dmitri Muratov of Novaya Gazeta, where Politkovskaya used to work.

During his speech at the rally, Novaya Gazeta journalist Oleg Khlebnikov proposed renaming Lesnaya Street in honor of his murdered colleague.

Garry Kasparov told the crowd that the Russian government was doing everything possible to prevent the country from having real journalists. As an example, he cited a scandalous calendar released earlier this week by female journalism students from the prestigious Moscow State University, Politkovskaya’s alma mater. The calendar was presented as a birthday gift for Prime Minister Putin, featuring the scantily-clad students coupled with suggestive phrases. The government, Kasparov asserted, has no use for professionals of Politkovskaya’s caliber.

“We know the answer to the rhetorical question of who orchestrated Anya’s murder,” he said.

Literary scholar Marietta Chudakova reminded those gathered of Putin’s remark that the journalist’s murder brought more harm upon the government than her publications had.

“He lacked the cultural understanding to realize that he’ll go down in history with precisely these words,” she said.

Memorials were also held in the cities of St. Petersburg, Voronezh, Tomsk, Kurgan, and elsewhere.

Russian state investigators said on Wednesday that they were extending an already long-standing probe into Politkovskaya’s death, but her colleagues doubted that the effort was genuine.

“How on earth is it possible to have not found Anna’s killers after four years?” alleged Muratov. “Perhaps political will is missing.”

President Kadyrov’s debut as an official predator of press freedom comes as no surprise following last year’s surge in violence against journalists in the North Caucasus. The report cites 5 journalists killed in that region in 2009 alone, and 22 since 2000:

Often referred to as “Putin’s guard dog,” Ramzan Kadyrov shares the Russian prime minister’s taste for crude language and strong action. President and undisputed chief of this Russian republic in the North Caucasus since April 2007, he has restored a semblance of calm after the devastation of two wars. A high price has been paid for this superficial stability, the introduction of a lawless regime. Anyone questioning the policies of this “Hero of Russia” (an award he received from Putin in 2004) is exposed to deadly reprisals. Two fierce critics of the handling of the “Chechen issue,” reporter Anna Politkovskaya and human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, were both gunned down – Politkovskaya in Moscow in October 2006 and Estemirova in Chechnya in July 2009. When human rights activists blamed him for their deaths, Kadyrov was dismissive: “That’s bullshit, that’s just gossip,” he said.

The report blames the Kremlin for buying Kadyrov’s loyalty and for using government-run media outlets to create the veneer of a legitimate press. The analysts were equally scathing of the prime minister himself:

“Control” is the key word for this former KGB officer: control of the state, control of the economic and political forces, control of geopolitical strategic interests and control of the media. The national TV stations now speak with a single voice. …The Nashi (Ours), a young patriotic guard created by the Kremlin in 2005 at the behest of Putin and others who lament Russia’s imperial decline, sues newspapers critical of the Soviet past or the current government when it is not staging actual manhunts. As well as manipulating groups and institutions, Putin has promoted a climate of pumped-up national pride that encourages the persecution of dissidents and freethinkers and fosters a level of impunity that is steadily undermining the rule of law.

Putin and Kadyrov found themselves among fifteen other presidents and prime ministers condemned as predators of press freedom, including Chinese President Hu Jintao, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. All over the world, says the organization, 9 journalists have been killed since the beginning of 2010, and another 300 are sitting behind bars. In Russia alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 19 journalists have been murdered as a direct result of their work since 2000. A murder conviction has only been handed down in one of those cases.

Nadezhda Prusenkova of the newspaper’s press service said that the DDoS attack on Novaya Gazeta’s server has increased in strength since its initiation on Tuesday morning. The site now receives one and a half million hits a second, effectively paralyzing it.

“We have prepared and are submitting today an appeal to law enforcement agencies, in which we basically are demanding that criminal proceedings be initiated,” Prusenkova said.

Novaya Gazeta is one of the only newspapers in Russia that remains openly critical of the Kremlin. Four of its journalists have been killed since 2001, including Anna Politkovskaya, whose October 2006 murder shocked the world and drew unprecedented scorn onto the Russian government. “There are visitors in our editorial office every day who have nowhere else to bring their troubles,” Politkovskaya wrote before her death, “because the Kremlin finds their stories off-message, so that the only place they can be aired is in our newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.”

“The editors of Novaya Gazeta consider this attack to be a direct violation of media laws, an impeding the realization of the professional activities of journalists, a violation of the rights of our readers to obtain prompt information and a breakdown of the agreement with our advertisers,” reads a post on the newspaper’s LiveJournal blog, which editors are using to publish material while the website remains inaccessible.

Editors of the newspaper suspect that the attack could be motivated by its recent extensive coverage of controversial house demolitions in the Moscow village of Rechnik. “Our correspondents are on duty in the village around the clock and send the editors photographs and videos, testimony from the victims, and also property ownership documents that still have not appeared in the news,” they said in a blog post.

“According to the information that we have, the house demolitions in the village are planned to be completed by Monday. And the materials that began to appear on our website are an absolutely undesirable background for this,” the post concludes.

Prusenkova noted that editors are attempting to find an alternative domain for the website in addition to LiveJournal. “But the problem is that the attack immediately goes exactly to the domain name ‘Novaya Gazeta’,” she said.

Russian opposition websites are quite frequently subjected to DDoS attacks. They often correspond with important political events, such as elections or large-scale protests. The website for the opposition movement Solidarity underwent such an attack in September 2009, after a presentation of movement leader Boris Nemtsov’s critical brochure on Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.

A preliminary investigation has concluded that the compound was in fact mercury, a highly toxic liquid metal that can damage human health and may have put Moskalenko’s family at risk.  At present, Moskalenko’s condition is being described as satisfactory.

Moskalenko regularly spends time in Strasbourg, and works with cases before the European Court of Human Rights there.  She has represented jailed oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Chechens who accused Russian authorities of brutal abuses, and a number of other prominent human rights cases, becoming one of Russia’s most well known rights attorneys.  Currently, Moskalenko is working with the family of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in a contract-style killing outside her apartment in October 2006.

French police have refused to comment on the investigation, and have not disclosed any conclusions.  While the event was described by some reports as a poisoning attempt, it was unclear whether there were other ways the mercury could have appeared in the car.  The family purchased the used vehicle in August.

Karinna Moskalenko was supposed to take part in pre-trail hearings into the Anna Politkovskaya case on October 15th.  The trial, which is being held behind closed doors at a military court in Moscow, has not been suspended.  It is unclear when Moskalenko will resume her role as the victim’s lawyer in the case.

—

Karinna Moskalenko on the mercury in her car:

“I do not know how long this substance was in the car, and for how long we breathed its fumes.  We constantly drove around Strasbourg, where I had to appear before the European Court of Human Rights.  I became ill, everything was swollen, I developed a cough, and I even had to go to the hospital.  But I also don’t know to what extent this is connected to a poisoning.  Despite feeling ill, I was able to address the court yesterday.”

[further reading:
Hundreds gather to remember slain Russian reporter (AP)
Politkovskaya Case Hits Court (Moscow Times) ]

Igor Yakovenko, Secretary General of the Russian Union of Journalists:

“Of course the country changed for the worse. The single fact that one of the brightest, most talented and very sincere people has died makes the country worse… The country could not withstand this trial. This was a provocation, a provocation to the journalist and civil communities. The country did not give it a worthy response, and did not withstand it. In Turkey, when a journalist was killed, the whole country took to the streets. As did Ukraine when [Georgiy] Gongadze was killed. After Anna Politkovskaya’s murder, nothing happened to this effect in Russia. The country did not pass the test of its conscience. The authorities received a signal from society that they could do anything they wanted. The society, journalists, the political community in no way reacted to Politkovskaya’s murder. As the country’s master of the house, [Vladimir] Putin said that her death caused more harm than did her work. He said these insulting words and found himself completely in the right. In these two years, journalism has thinned out. The fields of politics and public opinion have become worse. They have become deserted.”

Mikhail Kriger, human rights activist:

“Freedom and truth have become scarcer. There is not one person who you can count on, knowing that he won’t betray you. There is less justice.”

Alexander Podrabinek, editor-in-chief of the Prima-News information agency:

“I would say that over these two years, those tendencies which first surfaced after Politkovskaya’s murder became more readily apparent. They were exhibited in all their force. Before, the authorities allowed for violence against individual people, and today they don’t stop at violence against neighboring countries. The celebration of insolence and cynicism is marching ahead at full speed. The authorities are only growing stronger in this celebration.”

Garry Kasparov, leader of the United Civil Front:

“It has become worse. The regime kills such people! This serves as evidence that everything is plummeting into an abyss. No one knows who the masterminds and the perpetrators are. The mastermind, above all, is the regime itself. Specific people aren’t even as important. From the day of Politkovskaya’s murder, the persecution of freedom of speech and civil freedoms has intensified. The acting regime constitutes a threat. A sentence must be handed down to the killers. But it will only be real if it is handed down to the whole system.”

Tatyana Lokshina, deputy head of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch:

“Today is two years from the moment of Anna’s death. And even though the Prosecutor General is constantly informing us that the inquiry continues, so far, the killer hasn’t turned up on the defendant’s bench. We are observing a negative trend in a series of critical human rights problems. This includes the dangerously explosive situation in the North Caucasus, which Anna wrote much about. First and foremost is Ingushetia, which many are calling the new hot spot, and Dagestan –an extremely unstable, explosive region. We also note the generally dismal state of rights and freedoms in the country, and the plight of non-governmental organizations. At the end of the summer, an armed conflict between Russia and Georgia took place, the first conflict in the world between member countries of the Council of Europe, and this speaks for itself.”

translation by theotherrussia.org

“I didn’t speak of this earlier, but now I am forced to say it,” he said. “I am sick and tired of claims that the case is solved and will go to court. The case can’t be solved, when the person who ordered [the murder] isn’t identified, and the killer isn’t caught.”

Politkovskaya was murdered in a contract-style killing outside of her Mosow apartment building in October 2006. Since then, the investigation into her murder has slowly moved forward, without definitive results.

Muratov does not see anything wrong with the release of four of nine suspects connected in the case. The problem, in his opinion, are the repeated official statements that portend that the matter has been resolved, when in fact the investigation remains ambiguous.

Muratov welcomed a new development in the case of Yury Shchekochikhin, another journalist who died under mysterious circumstances in 2003. The case has just recent been reclassified as a murder investigation.

Earlier this week, Politkovskaya’s investigative committee made the decision to free another suspect, Shamil Buraev. They have pledged to complete their preliminary investigation by July 20th.