Russian Impunity

Rustam Makhmudov, the suspected hit-man in the October 2006 murder of Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya, was arrested May 31 in Chechnya, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “The arrest of the man suspected of carrying out the Politkovskaya shooting is a major advance but many questions remain unanswered,” RSF said. “Nearly five years have gone by...

Yakhya Magomedov, the young editor of the Avar-language version of a bi-monthly magazine that promotes a moderate vision of traditional Islam, was gunned down in northern Dagestan on May 8, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “We offer our condolences to Magomedov’s relatives and colleagues and we urge the authorities not to leave his death unpunished,”...

The conviction and sentencing of two defendants in the 2009 double murder of freelance journalist Anastasiya Baburova and human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov is a landmark victory in the fight against impunity in press killings in Russia, the Committee to Protect Journalists said. Moscow City Court Judge Aleksandr Zamashnyuk gave defendant Nikita Tikhonov life in a strict-regime penal colony...

Russian investigators have pledged to re-open investigations into the cases of five murdered journalists. Valery Ivanov, Natalia Skryl, Aleksei Sidorov, Yuri Shchekochikhin and Vagif Kochetkov were all killed—or are suspected to have been killed—in connection with their journalistic activities. They are all Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) of PEN International cases from the last nine years...

The Khimki City Court has overturned the defamation conviction of editor Mikhail Beketov, a verdict that had been condemned in Russia and abroad, New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists has reported. Beketov had been found guilty last month of slandering Khimki Mayor Vladimir Strelchenko in a 2007 television interview. In the interview, the journalist said his car had...

A court in the Moscow suburb of Khimki on Wednesday convicted Mikhail Beketov, the editor of the independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda, of criminally slandering Khimki's mayor, Vladimir Strelchenko, in a 2007 television interview. Beketov, who is in a wheelchair and unable to speak two years after a near-lethal attack, was wheeled into the courtroom for the verdict. Judge Arkady Khalatov...

Violent attacks have been carried out against two journalists in the Moscow region. Both victims, Oleg Kashin of the business daily Kommersant and Anatoly Adamchuk of the independent weekly Zhukovskiye Vesti, have covered a contentious highway project that would go through a forest in the Moscow suburb of Khimki, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Kashin worked...

Four years after Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed by an unknown assailant in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow her killers have yet to be brought to justice. Repeatedly criticised by rights groups over its handling of the case, the Russian government recently announced it was reinvigorating the investigation, and those involving 18 other...

Top Russian investigators have pledged to pursue 19 cases of murdered journalists presented to them by a delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists, reopening several closed cases and pursuing new leads in a number of other probes. The CPJ delegation, led by board member Kati Marton and CPJ Chairman Paul Steiger, met Tuesday with Aleksandr Bastrykin, chairman of the Investigative...

The head of a news agency and his deputy have been missing for a week in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, a republic in the Russian Caucasus. Khuda-Media director Abubark Rizvanov and his deputy, Timur Kurbanmagomedov, went missing after leaving their office at 4 p.m. on August 20 to buy a printer cartridge. After they failed to return, their colleagues tried to call them on their mobile...