Court orders further probe into Russian killing

[September 03, 2009]  MOSCOW (AP) -- In a surprise ruling, Russia's Supreme Court ordered further investigation Thursday into the killing of a journalist gunned down after harshly criticizing Vladimir Putin's Kremlin and human rights abuses in Chechnya.

The decision reversed a ruling by a lower court, which had rejected a request by Anna Politkovskaya's children for a single investigation into her 2006 slaying. That brazen Oct. 7 killing, in the elevator of her Moscow apartment, had prompted international outrage and deepened tensions between Russia and the West.

The new ruling will apparently end the retrial of three suspects whose acquittal was overturned by the Supreme Court earlier this year. The three are accused only of helping set up the slaying, not shooting the journalist or planning her death.

Politkovskaya's family says justice will not be done until both the gunman and the mastermind of the slaying are caught and punished.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court's military bench returned the case against three suspects to prosecutors and ordered them to merge that case with another investigation into the alleged gunman and the search for the mastermind, according to the court press service and a lawyer for one of the suspects.

Thursday's ruling could increase the chances that Russian authorities will eventually determine who was behind Politkovskaya's murder -- a crucial question in a country plagued by the killings of journalists and activists who criticize government authorities.

But it is unlikely to dispel persistent concern among relatives and rights activists about the government's willingness to conduct a complete, aggressive probe that could lead back to people in power.

"Whether the Prosecutor General's office will use this new opportunity we cannot say," said Karinna Moskalenko, a prominent human rights lawyer who has represented Politkovskaya's relatives. "We can only hope."

Sergei Sokolov, a deputy editor at Politkovskaya's newspaper Novaya Gazeta, said he was "cautiously optimistic" about the Supreme Court ruling but pessimistic about the possibility that a mastermind will ever face trial.

"We have always wanted a full, wide investigation. I hope the investigative team will take advantage of this ruling," he told The Associated Press.

During her career, Politkovskaya sharply criticized Putin's Kremlin and the Kremlin-backed government of Chechnya. The southern Russian area was the site of two post-Soviet separatist wars and of widespread rights abuses that Politkovskaya focused much of her investigative reporting on.

The three men in custody were acquitted after a trial marred by the absence of the suspected gunman and virtual silence from prosecutors on the key issue of who might have been behind the killing.

[Associated Press; By STEVE GUTTERMAN]

AP writers Mansur Mirovalev and David Nowak contributed to this report.

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