Killer of Russian journalist is known, editor says

MOSCOW: The independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper and Russian prosecutors know the identity of the man who killed Anna Politkovskaya, the newspaper's correspondent who was slain in a contract-style killing last year, according to the newspaper's editor and a special report planned for publication Monday.

But the identity of the person who ordered the killing has not been determined and the man who shot Politkovskaya has not been found and arrested, the editor said. He added that more time was needed to investigate the case.

"The organizer is free," said the paper's editor in chief, Dmitry Muratov. "This crime cannot be considered solved."

The new details shed further light on a case that has drawn international scrutiny and suggested that a degree of progress has been made in a investigation that Politkovskaya's friends and supporters have worried had been stalled and undermined by internal disarray.

Politkovskaya, a tireless critic of the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin, was an advocate of victims of human rights abuses, especially those from the two wars in Chechnya since 1994. She was shot multiple times with a pistol at the entrance to her apartment building on Oct. 7, 2006.

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The killing, which coincided with Putin's 54th birthday and became another in a string of murders of journalists in Russia, drew international condemnation and demands for a vigorous investigation.

In the year since, it has been framed as a challenge to Putin's legacy - an example of the criminality, corruption and culture of impunity beneath the surface of the partial recovery of Russia's economy and the Kremlin's confidence that have accompanied Putin's rule.

The case has proved a challenge to Novaya Gazeta as well. Long a sharp critic of Russia's government, the paper has cooperated closely with the team of investigators from the federal General Prosecutor's office, and withheld publishing many details of both the prosecutors' work and the newspaper's own parallel investigation.

Last Friday, as editors and reporters put the last touches on a special edition of the newspaper to mark the one-year anniversary of the killing, Muratov said the special report would commemorate Politkovskaya and disclose important new information. But it would not be a full accounting of what the editors know.

Instead, Muratov said, he was focused on helping prosecutors glean the remaining facts required to arrest both the gunman and the man who hired him.

Eleven people have been arrested in the case so far, and nine have been held on charges, Muratov said. He added that the suspects in custody were middlemen and accomplices in the crime, but that important suspects remain at large, and the newspaper is taking care not to compromise the investigation with leaks.

"My main task is not to give interviews and to write stories," Muratov said. "I want the bastards in jail."

Muratov provided advance copies of the two main articles of the special issue to The New York Times. One is an extended interview with Petros Garibyan, the prosecutor leading the government's investigation.

Garibyan's account differed slightly from Muratov's, saying that 10 men were in custody thus far, not nine. But he agreed that the identity of the man who shot Politkovskaya has been established.

"We have not charged the killer yet, but we know who he is," Garibyan said, according to the interview. Garibyan did not answer several calls on his cellphone on Sunday.

The second article, called "Anna and the Clown," is a description of the ordeal of Eduard Ponikarov, who in 2002, the article said, was beaten for hours by several men, including then-Major Pavel Ryaguzov of the FSB, the domestic successor to the KGB.

Ryaguzov sought to torture Ponikarov into submission with the goal of making him an FSB informant, code-named "Clown," who could be ruled by fear, Muratov said.

Instead, Ponikarov survived and lodged formal complaints with the authorities. But the case gained no traction and no one was punished, although Ryaguzov and an accomplice were identified, according to the special report.

Ryaguzov was later promoted to colonel. He is now one of the suspects detained in the Politkovskaya case and has been accused by prosecutors of assisting Politkovskaya's killers by giving them her home address.

Muratov and the special report suggest that the handling of the Ponikarov affair was an example of the culture of impunity for law enforcement officers in Russia that contributed to Politkovskaya's death.

If the men who tormented Ponikarov had been arrested in 2002, the newspaper's report says, "perhaps Anna Politkovskaya would still be alive."

Ponikarov, reached at home by telephone on Sunday, confirmed that Novaya Gazeta's account of his beating at the hands of the FSB officer was accurate.

Yuri Chaika, Russia's prosecutor general, said in August that Politkovskaya's killing had been ordered from abroad with the aim of destabilizing Russia. Muratov said last week that he knew of no evidence of foreign involvement and that he believed that Politkovskaya was killed because she was investigating corruption within Russia.

"According to our opinion, she touched upon the financial interests of people," he said. "And they decided to make her silent."

Muratov also distanced himself from Kremlin detractors who say that Putin directly ordered the crime. He offered a more nuanced view, saying that Putin's rule has allowed a climate in which journalists have been killed with impunity, but that the Russian president did not put out Politkovskaya's murder for hire.

Instead, he said, the Kremlin has built a regime in which her death is assumed to be allowed, and powerful criminals within the government and law enforcement agencies do as they please

"The power has created a climate in which journalists are enemies, democracy is not an efficient way of management or rule, and the special services are a new ruling class, a ruling elite, to which everything is permitted," he said. "When there is no parliamentary or public control of the special services, it is this atmosphere of censorship and permissiveness that brought this result."