Russia’s official investigation of the murder of human rights activist Natalya Estemirova is being carried out in a dishonest fashion, according to Presidential Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights member Svetlana Gannushkina, RIA Novosti reports.

Gannushkina said that Russian law enforcement agencies are no longer considering the possibility that federal security forces had a hand in Estemirova’s killing.

“We have the feeling that investigators have stopped [investigating] the version that was originally being looked into, about the connection between high-ranking law enforcement representatives and the Chechen government and the murder, and the connection with Natasha’s professional work – that she exposed [Abusubyan] Albekov’s public [and extrajudicial – ed.] execution,” she explained.

The human rights activist noted that the version currently being considered to be the most likely scenario – that Chechen militant Alkhazur Bashaev is responsible for the murder – “doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny.”

In addition, Gannushkina noted that an entire year has passed since Estemirova’s murder case has been last investigated.

Human rights advocates have long criticized the investigation of Estemirova’s murder in July 2009. Russia’s federal Investigative Committee has refuted their claims. On July 6, the activist’s colleagues presented Russian President Dmitri Medvedev with a report criticizing the investigation, and on July 14 promised to make the document public.

Natalya Estemirova, a member of the Chechen branch of the Memorial human rights center and expert counsel on Chechnya to Russia’s human rights ombudsmen, was kidnapped on the morning of July 15 near her home in Grozny. Her body, riddled with gunshot wounds to the chest and head, was discovered later that same day in an Ingush forest.

Colleagues and friends of the activist blame the Chechen government and President Ramzan Kadyrov personally for her death.

In 2009, Kadyrov sued Memorial head Oleg Orlov for slander in a civil case after the latter claimed the president was responsible for the killing. The court found him guilty in October 2009. However, a criminal case on the same charges filed by Kadyrov in July 2010 was turned down by a court just last month.

On Tuesday, Interfax reported that criminal charges of slander had been filed against the head of the Russian human rights organization Memorial, Oleg Orlov, by Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. The charges stem from comments by Orlov regarding connections between Kadyrov and last summer’s high-profile murder of Memorial activist Natalya Estemirova.

The Chechen president, who has been denounced by rights organizations worldwide for his alleged personal involvement in individual cases of murder, torture, and other rights abuses, won an earlier civil case against Orlov in which the Memorial director was forced to pay a fine. Kadyrov then promised to stop suing human rights activists after he was criticized by his mother for disrespecting his elders. With Tuesday’s announcement, that promise appears to have been broken. Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe reports on the Russian federal government’s misunderstanding of human rights organizations:

Well-known Russian rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina says the federal government is ignorant about the operations of human rights groups in the North Caucasus, RFE/RL’s Russian Service reports.

Gannushkina, of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Civic Assistance Committee, was reacting to reports that a Moscow court has charged Oleg Orlov, the head of the rights group Memorial, with defamation of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.

She told RFE/RL that “the dangerous part of human rights work comes from the local governments, not outside organizations.”

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in a meeting human rights activists on July 6 that he believes people need to be able “to send the government a signal” about the problems in the North Caucasus, often by going through NGOs.

But Putin warned that some NGOs in the North Caucasus are “supported by outside funds,” hinting that they are being financed by political organizations abroad.

Gannushkina said such an accusation is not new. She added that activists do not follow orders from anyone, though she admitted that most of the funding for NGOs comes from foreign and private companies.

In a statement on Thursday to the Russian news agencies Interfax and RIA Novosti, law enforcement sources said that the murder had been solved and a killer had been identified. The killer has not, however, been detained, and a search is currently underway. Investigators, the sources said, are also still working to establish the identity of the person who ordered the murder.

Oleg Orlov of the Memorial human rights center, where Estemirova had worked, has already refuted the announcement. Speaking to Gazeta.ru, Orlov said that his colleagues at Memorial have spoken with representatives of the groups investigating Estemirova’s murder, and that these representatives denied that the announcement was true. “They said that they haven’t established the name of the murderer,” said Orlov.

While Gazeta.ru was able to obtain an unofficial confirmation from sources in the Chechen Investigative Committee that the culprit has been identified, all official sources proved to be unreachable on Thursday. The Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia refrained from commenting, and the official representative of the Chechen Investigative Committee was out of the office and did not answer her cell phone throughout the course of the day. The newspaper was also unable to reach the press secretary of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who had promised to monitor the course of the murder investigation.

The 50-year-old Estemirova had been the lead member of Memorial’s office in the Chechen capital of Grozny, and had worked to investigate kidnappings and murders of people in Chechnya. She was kidnapped herself not far from her home in the capital on June 15 of last year, and was later found shot dead in the Nazranovsky district of Ingushetia.

Memorial, which soon after announced that it was shutting down operations in Chechnya, blamed Estemirova’s murder on President Kadyrov, claiming that the volatile situation in the republic was the president’s responsibility. Kadyrov successfully sued Orlov for slander, and a Moscow city court fined Orlov 70 thousand rubles (about $2300). In the beginning of February, after experiencing pressure from public officials and a particularly public dressing-down from his mother for failing to respect his elders, Kadyrov dropped all further suits against other human rights activists, including the prominent 82-year-old Lyudmila Alexeyeva.

The news of Estemirova’s murder had a powerful resonation throughout the world. In particular, United States President Barack Obama issued a statement calling on the Russian authorities to investigate the murder and punish those responsible. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said that he did not believe that Kadyrov had participated in the tragedy, and considered the murder to be an act of provocation against the government.

Kadyrov, however, gave several interviews after the murder in which he spoke out harshly against the slain activist. Defending himself on Radio Liberty and saying that he took no part in the killing, the Chechen president said that he “had no reason to kill a woman who nobody needed.” Referring to her place on a public council under the Grozny city administration, he added that “she has never had any honor, dignity, or a conscience, and all the same I named her as a council representative.” He also did admit that he had later dissolved the council.

When asked if he thought the murder would ever be solved, Orlov stated that the politics tied up in the Estemirova’s case made it hard to say. “In naming this or that person as having participated in the murder, or in naming the person who possibly ordered the murder, the investigators and prosecutors are invariably stepping into a type of political realm,” he told the Kasparov.ru online newspaper.

Memorial member Aleksandr Cherkasov noted the 2002 murder investigation of an outspoken Chechen village leader, Malika Umazheva, as a cautionary tale. An official investigation blamed the killing on militants who it turned out had long been dead, and also on people who had only issued confessions under torture. Memorial’s own investigation established that Umazheva had been murdered by federal security forces, likely in retaliation for the leader’s fervent criticism of the ongoing Russian federal raids in her village.

According to the report, Isa Yamadayev says in the letter that his life is in danger, and he asks for personal support from the president. “One after another my brothers are killed. In 2003 militants killed Yamadayev Dzhabrail. In 2008 in Moscow they killed Ruslan Yamadayev; in the United Arab Emirates my brother Sulim Yamadayev was shot. Now the hunt is open for me,” he says.

Yamadayev refers in the letter to common speculation in the press that the Kremlin has given carte blanche to Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, and therefore closes its eyes to the murders of political opponents in the region.

“Is it really so that now, without analysis, all opponents of Kadyrov are declared enemies of Russia and can be killed? Human rights advocate Natalya Estemirova of Memorial, killed in 2009, Movladi Atlangeriyev, kidnapped in Moscow in 2007, and then killed in Chechnya, the president of Konvers-Group Aleksandr Antonov and his anonymous guard, killed in Moscow in 2009. They are what, also enemies of Russia?” the letter asks.

Yamadayev says that he sees only one answer to this question: That President Medvedev is not informed of the true state of affairs concerning the investigation of these crimes.

At the end of his letter, Yamadayev expresses certainty that he will also be killed, and asks Medvedev “to stop this mad conveyer of death.”

The Yamadayev brothers were former allies of the Kadyrov family in Chechnya, but their relationship took a turn for the worse after the death of former President Akhmad Kadyrov in 2004. Relations between the clans spoiled altogether after a crash between the Kadyrov motorcade and a convoy driven by Badrudi Yamadayev.

Several months after the crash, Ruslan Yamadayev was shot and killed in Moscow. In March 2009, unknown persons shot Sulim Yamadayev; one of the suspects had close ties to President Ramzan Kadyrov. The Times newspaper in London cites Sulim’s killing as the sixth violent murder of Kadyrov opponent in a row. Isa Yamadayev had stated in May that he believed his life to be in danger.

The Kremlin-backed Kadyrov regime in Chechnya has recently come under fire for murdering members of opposition forces, a charge that both the Kadyrovs and the Kremlin deny. Nevertheless, the murdered Yamadayev brothers are among a number of other recently targeted opponents. Former Kadyrov bodyguard Umar Israilov was assassinated in Vienna after becoming a critic of the regime. Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the president of a breakaway Chechen republic, was killed in exile by Russian military intelligence in 2004.

On her Ekho Moskvy radio program, commentator Yulia Latynina spoke at length about the murder of rights activist Natalya Estemirova in Chechnya.  Latynina, who worked together with Estemirova on reporting rights abuses in the North Caucasus republic, was incredulous that an official investigation would find her killers.

Estemirova’s death is already having drastic consequences for the human rights community in the Northern Caucasus, as the Memorial rights group announced it would likely be closing its office in Chechnya.

Read more about the tragic murder from The Sunday Times (UK), and the New York Times.

Translated text follows.

—
Yulia Latynina – Access Code radio program
Ekho Moskvy Radio
July 18, 2009

“The most dreadful event of not only the last week but probably the last few years is Natalya Estemirova’s murder in the Caucasus. I think it is no exaggeration to say that Natalya Estemirova was the Memorial human rights centre in Chechnya. She is a person through whose hands passed the entire information about the horrors taking place in Chechnya. Anna Politkovskaya always stayed at her house. I think Anna would have been only glad to quote Estemirova in her publications, but it was too dangerous. And now, post factum, when Natalya is dead, we can say that a great deal of what Anna wrote was what Estemirova had told her.

“After Anna’s death, Estemirova published in Novaya Gazeta under an assumed name. By the way, on Monday (20 July) we (Novaya Gazeta) will publish a collection of Estemirova’s articles under an assumed name. But all we know about abductions, about burnt down houses of militants’ families, all this was reported by Estemirova. After Estemirova’s death, there will be no sources of information about what is happening in Chechnya that would be an alternative to the official point of view.

“Estemirova’s death completely changes the entire situation in the Caucasus, because it is one thing when militants’ houses are burnt down, but is another thing when a human rights activist who talks about it is killed. The former may be explained by political necessity, the latter can never be explained by anything.

“At the funeral of (murdered human rights lawyer) Stanislav Markelov, whom Estemirova knew well, both Memorial head Oleg Orlov and Novaya Gazeta’s editor-in-chief Dmitriy Muratov pleaded with her to leave Grozny. She refused. I’m saying this because now the Prosecutor-General’s Office cannot find evidence that there were threats against her. Well, apparently Muratov and Orlov were mad at that moment.

“Natalya Estemirova was abducted at 0830 in the morning of 15 July. She was snatched by people in a white Zhiguli car, who apparently did not know her because, according to eyewitnesses, she was being followed by a woman who reportedly pointed to Natalya.

“There is a bruise on her body – she was grabbed by the shoulder, and a bruise on her face – she was hit in the face. Her wrists were cuffed. She was taken though several checkpoints, including the main checkpoint Kavkaz. It looks like the people who were transporting her produced some service ID cards, thanks to which they were allowed to pass the checkpoint easily. They not only took her through the checkpoint easily but also moved her to another car. Because she was abducted in the white Zhiguli car, while the road in the area where she was killed, near the village of Gazi-Yurt, is so muddy that it must have been a jeep, something like Niva. She was killed where she was dumped, not far from the road, by two lethal shots in the chest and an insurance shot in the head.

“I’m saying this because investigators from the Investigations Committee under the prosecutor’s office are now telling us that they have already established that Estemirova was being kidnapped, but when the kidnappers saw police beacon lights on the Kavkaz highway, as someone else was shot there, they panicked. Well, the killers were not afraid of the checkpoints, but once they saw beacon lights – that’s a rare thing, a police beacon light on the Kavkaz highway – they panicked right away. This alone is enough to say that the investigation is telling obvious lies. It seems that soon we will be presented with some dead militant who had killed Estemirova, or a warrior from the (disbanded) Vostok battalion, or a saboteur sent by (Georgian President) Saakashvili. But I don’t think anyone will believe that.

“By the way, about theories: Deputy (Interior) Minister Arkadiy Yedelev, who told us a week ago that Georgian militants were fighting in the (North) Caucasus, has already voiced several theories of Natalya Estemirova’s murder. One of the theories was stunningly brilliant – she was robbed. You see, she had a lot of money from Western grants, she was scavenging around Western embassies like a jackal, and she was robbed. However, even her mobile phone was not touched by those strange robbers who abducted her at 0830 and already killed her by around 1000, quite far from where she was abducted, after taking her through checkpoints. This is one theory Yedelev has. According to another of his theories, militants did it. Right, I can easily imagine militants, who are currently cornered in Ingushetia’s forests, whose situation is really difficult, under permanent bombardment, sneaking out of there, obtaining some federal ID cards, going to Grozny and killing the only person in Chechnya who had been protecting their relatives whose houses are burnt down. It is strange that Yedelev, when talking about his theories, forgot about the Georgian militants he had mentioned earlier. Maybe it was they who killed Estemirova, Mr Yedelev?  How could you forget?”

translation by BBC Monitoring.