Anna Politkovskaya has been murdered by gunmen in Moscow. Politkovskaya was a fearless journalist who took on Russia’s most powerful and corrupt in order to out the truth about the dodgy dealings of Russia’s bureaucracies, governments, institutions and mafia. She was a woman with many enemies. One of whom was the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. She was the author of two books: Putin’s Russia and A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya.
The Independent reports that she was just about to publish an expose on Chechnya’s Prime Minister.
A body found slumped in a Moscow lift. A discarded pistol and four spent shells. A mysterious thin man in a black baseball cap. The murder yesterday of Anna Politkovskaya, the most famous reporter in Russia, is a story as sinister as anything she investigated in her fearless, award-winning career.
The 48-year-old, lauded by journalists and writers around the world for her exposés in Chechnya, appears to have been assassinated. Her most powerful enemy was President Vladimir Putin. The murder came two days before she was due to publish an exposé of the Chechnyan Prime Minister.
Politkovskaya came to the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year. I wanted to go and see her talk but unfortunately I didn’t- even though I was at the festival at the time of her panel. Damn.
Also, two German journalists have been killed in a shooting in Afghanistan.
The slain journalists - identified as Karen Fischer, 30, and Christian Struwe, 38 - worked as freelancers for Deutsche Welle, Germany’s state-owned broadcaster.
The two were travelling in a Toyota four-wheel drive through the northern province of Baghlan, about 150 km north-west of Kabul, and had stopped outside a small village, where they set up a tent to spend the night, said Mohammad Azim Hashami, the provincial police chief.
They were killed by AK-47 gunfire at around 1.30 am, he said.
Update- More information on the story Polikovskaya was about to publish:
She was a harsh critic of President Vladimir Putin’s rule and was working on a story about torture in Chechnya, where a Kremlin-backed strongman has all but routed a separatist movement that sparked two bloody wars, but at a cost to Russia that has yet to be measured. The article was to be published Monday, according to her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, one of the few independent media outlets in Russia.
The death of Anna Politkovskaya is a blow to independant journalists everywhere- and reminds us of the amazing risks and danger people like Politkovskaya face when they speak truth to power.