On August 28th 2007 it was announced that 10 people were arrested in connection to her murder:

"Controversy arose because the prosecutor, Yuri Y. Chaika, suggested that the motive for killing had not been to silence Ms. Politkovskaya, whose efforts to uncover corruption and brutality under President Vladimir V. Putin had brought her international acclaim but scorn from officials here.

Rather, the prosecutor said, the killing was intended to discredit the Kremlin, by raising suspicions that it had been involved, and ultimately to destabilize the Russian state. That now-official theory is markedly different from one broadly accepted by her peers, who have said she was killed in retaliation for her work or to prevent additional articles from being published.

Among those arrested, the prosecutor said, were a police major and three former police officers, who were working with a criminal gang led by a Chechen. Also arrested, he said, was a former officer in the F.S.B., the principal successor to the K.G.B.

Mr. Chaika added that the killing had been ordered from abroad, although he refused to identify the man suspected of being the mastermind or disclose his whereabouts, and provided no evidence to support the claim. The prosecutor would not release the names of any of the suspects.

His description of the motive aligned neatly with Mr. Putin's first public statements about the killing last year and with a pattern of government contentions that foreigners were trying to undermine Russia and the Kremlin, and to tarnish their reputations."

"The Kremlin press pool is a handpicked group of reporters, most of whom work for the state and the rest selected for their fidelity to the Kremlin's rules of the game. Helpful questions are often planted. Unwelcome questions are not allowed. And anyone who gets out of line can get out of the pool.

The Kremlin press pool is like so many institutions in Russia that have the trappings of a Western-style pluralistic society but operate under a different set of understandings, part of what analyst Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center calls "the illusion of democracy." Television channels air newscasts with fancy graphics but follow scripts approved by the Kremlin. Elections are held, but candidates out of favor with the Kremlin are often knocked off the ballot. Courts conduct trials, but the state almost never loses. Parliament meets but only to rubber-stamp Kremlin legislation.

"Russia is yet another country where a free press is upheld in the language of the constitution, but the reality is one of state control of expression, concentration of media in the hands of the very few and very rich, and violence against journalists who report on crime and corruption.

Vladimir Putin's tenure has been marked by firm and incremental moves by the state against press freedom and independence. In some cases, the Putin government's strategies are relatively direct, such as strict controls on reporting in Chechnya. Other approaches -- such as the targeting of journalists with politically-motivated libel suits, or hostile takeovers of key media outlets by businessmen with close ties to Putin himself -- are more subtle, yet consistent and effective strategies for ensuring that the state influence permeates the media at all levels.

The strategy has resulted in the takeover of a prominent and outspoken, independent, national television station and the consolidation of newspaper and magazine ownership under a handful of powerful oligarchs. While an independent press does exist in Russia, the overall effect has been to stifle criticism of Putin and his regime on key issues like government corruption and abuses in Chechnya. Media support for the Putin government was particularly evident in the parliamentary elections in spring of 2004, during which Russian press groups complained of state-dominated television's promotion of the pro-Kremlin parties.

The right to free expression is more flagrantly violated at the local level, where journalists who report on corrupt politicians and organized crime are routinely harassed, attacked, and sometimes murdered, with generally only a perfunctory and thoroughly flawed prosecution to follow. A noteworthy case is the murder of the editor-in-chief of an independent newspaper in Togliatti, an industrial city in the Volga River region, in October of 2003. It was the second murder of the editor of the very same publication in less than two years. The following investigation has been denounced as a sham."

*requeue

Re-queueing this video for one more try; last queued Saturday, November 24th, 2007 7:35am PST - requeue requested by submitter Farhad2000.

Call me an idiot, but I highly doubt the Kremlin OR Putin would find her work SO THREATENING that they had to send government assassins to take her down. Especially after watching the Orange revolution unfold from the same exact way in Ukraine. Are the Russian government so stupid to do such a thing??? This is downright fantasy level conspiracy theory. You wanna see what you WANNA see, that being me and you both.

Just because she was against the Russian government, the culprit automatically becomes that of her enemies in life. Russia has had a lot of fishy underhanded activities before and it's justified that they should be the prime suspects. But in this case it just doesn't make sense.

The rational explanation would be that a former Russian soldier who served in Chechnya hated her biased journalism so much that he took the matter into his own hands. You guys do realize that she has an extremely leftist liberal outlook, and was never liked by the Russian troops. War is brutal, for both parties. Yet she always sided with the Chechnyans, and that pissed off a lot of Russian patriots who always thought her works were unfair and biased and always downplayed the brutality of Chechnya rebels and only focusing on the retaliation acts of Russian soldiers.

Part of being a journalist is having tolerable rapport and non-biased views of the situation, and report the situation as is, without one's own analysis. Imagine how our troops feel if you went to Iraq as a journalist and constantly complained and criticized US troops for bombarding Afghans and starving Iraqi children, yet report how awful the Americans are because they're terrorizing the neighborhood with random raids and patrols but getting anything done, and that they're useless, and blame all the collateral damage on them. And the reporter is here to interview you about how futile the US efforts are in Middle east, while you lay in bed with a charred leg from an roadside IED, and just got back from a friend's funeral.

Your feelings to strangle the reporter is justified at that point. Well at least American journalists are trained to be unbiased and fair, which is very hard to do and often a forgotten art nowadays.

Anna Politkovskaya, on the other hand, never tried to understand Russians' side of the aspect, like many many other ultra liberal crazies. Yes we should mourn for her death, but don't justify her loss by saying 'she was right about everything'. Because she was a very biased journalist who provoked and enraged the Russian soldiers.


My god, the more I read about you guys posts, more I realize how sickened I am by ultra liberal craziness. I think you guys are starting to turn me into a hard ass conservative Republican!! 0_o What have you done to me?!?!!? (although Republicans hate Russians just as much as any other. A common trait throughout American history. Shared hatred against enemy FTW! Reunite the nation by focusing on hating Russia!!!)

Anna Politkovskaya was not an "ultra liberal crazy" as you put it, she was in fact one of the few journalists who dared questioned the official line from the Kremlin, she asked the questions that no one dare asked and was submitting to various acts of harrassement by the state who viewed her reportage as dangerous.

Politkovskaya made her name reporting from lawless Chechnya, where many journalists and humanitarian workers have been kidnapped or killed. She was arrested and subjected to mock execution by Russian military forces there, and she was poisoned on the way to Beslan, but survived and continued her reporting. She authored several books about Chechen wars and Putin's Russia and received numerous prestigious international awards for her work.

Her numerous articles critical of the war in Chechnya described abuses committed by Russian military forces, by Chechen rebels, and by the Russian-backed Chechen administration led by Akhmad Kadyrov and his son Ramzan Kadyrov. Politkovskaya chronicled human rights abuses and policy failures in Chechnya and elsewhere in Russia's North Caucasus in several books on the subject, including A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya and A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, which painted a picture of brutal war in which thousands of innocent citizens have been tortured, abducted or killed at the hands of Chechen or federal authorities."

"We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit."

As of 26 January 2007, British officials said police had solved the murder of Litvinenko. They discovered "a 'hot' teapot at London's Millennium Hotel with an off-the-charts reading for polonium-210, the radioactive material used in the killing." In addition, a senior official said investigators had concluded the murder of Litvinenko was "a 'state-sponsored' assassination orchestrated by Russian security services."

Again, You wanna see what you WANNA see, that being me and you both.

There's all kinds of information flying left and right and 'facts' they claim. And I remember at one point Litvinenko going as far as accusing Putin of a pedophile and a rapist. I mean, what the crap is all this?? That surely adds to his legitimacy.

To me, this is no different than 9/11 conspiracy theorists coming up with really convincing 'evidence' of a staged attack on world trade center. You distrust the government and don't agree with their policies, so anything that fits the scenario sounds very plausible. And smart people make it sound really really convincing.

This is why I always have a reason of doubt when it comes to this type of genres. A nation's president having direct hand in Assassination etc etc. You hear a lot of that in Latin American politics as well (not just Hugo Chavez). And it makes them paranoid as heck, and start coming up with all these crazy facts about US government and such.

To be fair, they too have legit reasons as to why they distrust US government. After all, CIA agents did assassinate a truck load of South American leaders for a long time. But to go as far as claiming that 'US president personally ordered this assassination of my next door neighbor' and such, really doesn't make sense.

So in Russian case, I see it the same way. And that is why I always try to be level headed and see it from a different perspective other than 'the government LIES TO YOU!' (be it American or Russian) type of deal.

And I'm not calling you a conspiracy theorist. I'm just stating the reason why I am skeptical about all these claims.