Status: 07.10.2021 3:57 p.m.
For a long time, the Russian government was not interested in who was behind the Politkovskaya murder. Now the Kremlin said that the case should be resolved. The limitation period for a conviction of possible backers has expired.
Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist critical of the Kremlin, was murdered exactly 15 years ago. Years later, the two perpetrators were sentenced to life imprisonment, three other men received imprisonment between twelve and 20 years for complicity. To this day, the client behind the murder is still unclear.
On the anniversary of her assassination, the Kremlin announced that the case should be fully resolved. “Of course we all want the perpetrators – both those who ordered the crime and those who carried it out – to be identified and punished,” said spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Limitation period expired
There are doubts about that. The Kremlin-critical newspaper “Novaya Gazeta”, for which Politkovskaya worked before her murder, accuses the Russian authorities of having no interest in the case being cleared up for political reasons. “We are deeply convinced that the political leadership of our country knows the name of the client, but does not consider it politically expedient to hold him accountable,” said the deputy editor-in-chief of “Novaya Gazeta”, Sergei Sokolov.
The court ruling against their contract killers could not have come about without the persistence of the lawyers. The limitation period for a conviction of possible clients has now expired after 15 years and the names of the client, the agent and other parties involved are still not known.
Violations of human rights
Politkovskaya had won several awards for her reporting and her books. On October 7, 2006, the then 48-year-old was shot in the elevator of her house in Moscow. Her family and colleagues from “Novaya Gazeta” suspect a political motive. Among other things, she exposed human rights violations in Chechnya.
The EU has already called on Russia to hold all those responsible to account “in an open and transparent judicial process”. The European Court of Human Rights accused Russia of serious human rights violations in the case in 2018.