The Trial of Suspects Believed to Have Partaken in Politkovskaya’s Murder Attests to the Prosecutors’ Inability to Get to the Bottom of the Case

The trial for the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, which took place in October 2006, has opened with the suspected killer still at large, the press excluded from the proceedings, and an apparent attempted poisoning of the prosecution’s lawyer. But even if the three existing defendants are found guilty, the actual masterminds of the murder have little to worry about.

We will probably never know who killed Anna Politkovskaya. The opening of pretrial proceedings at the Moscow District Military Court on Wednesday confirms, rather than confounds that statement. The three men who are facing prosecution, Sergei Khadjikurbanov and Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, ethnic Chechens and brothers, are accused of shadowing Politkovskaya prior to the killing. But the man believed to have actually pulled the trigger (Rustam Makhmudov, Dzhabrail and Ibraghim’s older brother) is yet to have been detained; the identity of who actually ordered the killing is still unknown; the money supposed to have changed hands in payment for the killing has apparently not been traced; and none of the accused has confessed or agreed to assist the investigation.

If the prosecution has a weak case (and with no murderer in the dock or blood money in the evidence room it is not looking strong), it will not be helped by the fact that the professions of two of the suspects, Lt. Col. Pavel Ryaguzov, a serving FSB officer, and Sergei Khadjikurbanov , a former member of the anti-organized crime unit of the Moscow police department, mean the trial may be closed to the press and to the public. “As for the secret documents, they concern our requests to the FSB and MVD [the Interior Ministry] that are responsible, for example, for the observation service, whose officers’ names are classified,” Petros Garibyan, the senior investigator from the investigating committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office, told Novaya Gazeta in a recent interview. The next hearing will decide whether these “secret” materials mean that the press must be barred from the court room.

Meanwhile, the press has reported extensively on an apparent attempted poisoning of Politkovskayas’ family lawyer, Karinna Moskalenko, in France. The hearing went ahead without her, despite requests from the prosecution to delay proceedings until she was well enough to attend.

This week’s events have not been confidence building; in that, they are consistent with how the case has been conducted from the very beginning. It has been characterized by a bizarre mixture of surprise breakthroughs marred by premature announcements, extraordinary contradictions, and repeated leaks of sensitive information to the press.

Throughout the investigation, progress has been matched almost step for step by setbacks and frustrations. For almost a year after Politkovskaya’s murder, little was said officially. Then, on August 27, 2007, then Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika called a press conference in which he announced the arrest of ten people connected with the killing. He neither named the suspects nor explained their roles, but did say that they included serving and former members of the FSB and members of a Chechen-led criminal gang. On the same day, the FSB’s internal security department announced that a serving officer, Lt. Col. Pavel Ryaguzov, was suspected of being involved in the killing. Two days later, on August 29, a spokesman for Moscow City courts announced a warrant had been issued for the arrest of an eleventh suspect, identified as a former police officer in the Moscow Anti-Organized Crime Directorate (that was presumably Khadjikurbanov , though he was not named at the time).

After ten months of official silence, this apparent progress came as a welcome surprise – particularly the admission from both the prosecutor general and the FSB itself that security officers were involved. Politkovskaya was well known to have earned enemies amongst the security services, and the notion that FSB men might have been involved in her murder surprised no one. The idea that they might face justice did.

Then came the setbacks. Many of the names that Chaika had refused to mention in his press conference were almost immediately leaked to the press, compromising the investigation. By August 30, 2007, two of the eleven suspects had already been released because there was insufficient evidence to hold them longer. The remaining nine suspects were apparently charged, but by May 12, 2008, Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the investigating committee, said only seven remained in custody. Now, four have been charged, and three more have apparently been released, but it is not clear why.

Of the four who remain, only three – the two Makhmudov brothers, who are said to have followed Politkovskaya and passed information on to the killer, and Khadjikurbanov, who is said to have directed them – are to be tried for involvement in the killing. The case against these three is “pretty strong,” said Sergei Sokolov, the deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta who headed the paper’s own investigation of the killing. But the trial is “about three and half men,” Sokolov added. The involvement of the fourth man, Ryagazov, is more tenuous.

On August 30, 2007, a spokesman for the Moscow District Military Court told the Associated Press that the arrest of Ryagazov was “in no way” connected with the Politkovskaya murder – a direct contradiction of the FSB’s announcement three days earlier. A few weeks later, however, Shamil Burayev, the former head of the Achkoi-Martan administrative district in Chechnya, was arrested (in what was becoming a predictable pattern, his name was also leaked to Komsomolskaya Pravda before the authorities announced it. In April 2008, Rustam Makhmudov’s name was leaked to the same paper), and accused of hiring Ryaguzov to find Politkovskaya’s home address.

But Burayev was released, and although Ryaguzov is to be tried as part of the same case, he is charged not with the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, but with abuse of office and the attempted blackmail of a businessman called Eduard Ponikarov in 2003. “I could not make Ryaguzov’s case separate, as he did all that jointly with Khadjikurbanov, who is also accused of Politkovskaya’s murder,” Garibyan, the investigator, said in the Novaya Gazeta interview. Because Ryaguzov is a serving FSB officer, the entire case will be heard in a military court. “The courts will be military ones because one of the accused – Lt. Col. Ryaguzov – is an acting FSB officer. The rest did not object to military justice,” Garibyan told Novaya Gazeta.

That raises the suspicion that the FSB man is being attached to this case simply to ensure that the trial is heard in a military court. Like so much about this case, however, that is a matter of conjecture, and it is unclear who the military court benefits. The case will still be tried by a jury, and the issue of secrecy applies to documents submitted as evidence, not to the court itself. Sokolov, indeed, still believes Ryaguzov was involved in Politkovskaya’s murder, even if it is as yet unclear how, and thinks elements in the security services have been protecting him by obstructing the investigation.

Yet for all the leaks, premature statements and controversies, “in the grand scheme of things, this is progress,” said Nina Ogninova, Europe and Central Asia program coordinator at the Commitee to Protect Journalists, who has followed the case closely. “We have to commend Garibyan’s team, even if we have reservations about the Prosecutor General’s motives.”

“We don’t have any disagreement with the investigators concerning those three suspects,” Sokolov agreed, “though we have a slightly different opinion about Ryaguzov’s involvement.”

With no confessions or money changing hands, it seems that the prosecution’s case will be largely based on CCTV footage and telephone call records. We will only see how strong such a case can be once the trial opens – if it is not held in a closed court. But even with a guilty verdict, this trial will not close the case. Rustam Makhmudov, believed to be the killer, has still to be detained. The question of who ordered the killing, and who is laundering the money for the hit, will remain. Nor will it change the fact that somebody did their best to sabotage the investigation by leaking suspects’ names, and somebody put mercury in Karinna Moskalenko’s car on the eve of the trial. In this case, establishing the truth is proving as bewildering as sorting the good news from the bad.

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