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Russia orders retrial in Politkovskaya case
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Russia orders retrial in Politkovskaya case
AFP - Friday, June 26
MOSCOW (AFP) - - Russia's supreme court Thursday ordered a new trial of the suspects in the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya after annulling acquittals decided in February.
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"The supreme court has annulled the innocent verdict in the case of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. The case will be examined again with new jurors," supreme court spokesman Pavel Odintsov told AFP.
The rejection of the controversial verdicts was the latest twist in a case that human rights groups say has been marked by the Russian authorities' total failure to bring Politkovskaya's killers to justice.
Politkovskaya's relatives condemned the decision, saying that instead of a retrial, authorities needed to launch a completely new investigation into the murder of the journalist, who was highly critical of the Kremlin.
None of the four suspects brought to trial had been charged with pulling the trigger in the shooting nor with ordering the apparent contract killing of Politkovskaya in her Moscow apartment building on October 7, 2006.
Murad Musayev, the lawyer for one of the accused, slammed the supreme court decision as "political" but also called it predictable.
"This was a political decision taken at the highest level. We will contest this decision, but it is near fatalistic to do so in this country," Musayev told AFP.
"In our country acquittal is considered an ill that must be fought against, especially if the trial in question has wide resonance," he added.
Politkovskaya family lawyer Anna Stavitskaya said: "We did not appeal the acquittal verdict because we saw no basis to do so.
"But the supreme court did not consider our opinion," she added. "We will demand in preliminary hearings that the case be returned to prosecutors -- that is to say that a new investigation be undertaken."
The supreme court judges said in their ruling that the previous trial had suffered from "serious violations which had an impact on the issuing a just verdict," the Interfax news agency reported.
The ruling said that the trial judge had failed to react properly to the violations and this could have prejudiced the views of the jury.
Of the suspects, Chechen brothers Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov had been accused of acting as drivers at the murder scene for the killer -- whom prosecutors say is a third brother, Rustam, who is still at large.
Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former police investigator had been charged with providing logistical assistance for the killing.
The fourth defendant, Pavel Ryaguzov, a former agent of the FSB security service, was not directly accused of taking part of the murder but faced charges of extortion in a case related to the other defendants.
During hearings, the defence team pointed out that the suspects' DNA had not been found on the weapon and that records of phone calls made by the accused did not prove their presence at the murder scene.
Despite lasting three months, the original trial also failed to shed any significant light on the circumstances of the killing.
"Politkovskaya's children believe there was no proof of the guilt of these people... but many questions remain about the case that were not even addressed at the trial," Stavitskaya said.
Politkovskaya wrote dozens of articles for her Novaya Gazeta newspaper and a book called "Putin's Russia," accusing Putin of strangling democracy and detailing horrific abuses during the Kremlin's war in Chechnya.
After her murder, Putin called for Politkovskaya's killers to be punished but also dismissed her ability to influence political life in Russia as "extremely insignificant."
The authorities' failure to find the killers raised concerns that enemies of critical journalists were able to act with impunity in Russia.
A young journalist working as an intern at Novaya Gazeta, Anastasia Baburova, was gunned down in central Moscow earlier this year as she emerged from a news conference with a prominent human rights lawyer.
That brought the death toll to five in the number of the newspaper's employees who have died in suspicious or violent cases since 2000.
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Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya at a 2005 book fair in Leipzig, Germany. Russia's supreme court Thursday ordered a new trial of the suspects in the murder of investigative journalist Politkovskaya after annulling acquittals decided in February.
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