The Accused.(murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya)(Report)

The first day I tried to attend the trial of the men accused of organizing and abetting the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, my papers weren't in order and I didn't get in. I walked across the street to a Starbucks and for the rest of the day read a tall stack of printouts I'd made about the case from the Web site of Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya's old paper. While I sat there, a young human-rights lawyer was shot in the back of the head right outside the subway stop I'd got out of that morning. He was accompanied by a twenty-five-year-old Novaya Gazeta freelancer. The assassin shot and killed her, too, before ducking into the subway and getting away. The next day, I was allowed into the trial.

Anna Politkovskaya was murdered as she came home with some groceries on a Saturday afternoon, October 7, 2006, Vladimir Putin's birthday. The killer waited inside her entryway and shot her when she got into the elevator. He shot her three times from outside the elevator, and then, when she fell from the impact, stepped into the elevator and shot her two more times. Politkovskaya was forty-eight years old, and very thin. In photographs, as a younger woman, she is attractive but plain; in middle age, with her dark features and short, gray hair, she had become striking. On the day of the murder, she wore black pants and a black vest. At the trial, the prosecutors handed around the bullets recovered from her body and showed a large color photograph of Politkovskaya crumpled on the elevator floor, blood seeping from the wounds in her head, the murder weapon with its long black silencer next to her right hand, which still clutched a plastic bag full of groceries.

It was hard to know who would have had more cause to kill Politkovskaya: Putin and his Federal Security Bureau (F.S.B.) cohort, which she'd mercilessly criticized; the pro-Kremlin Administration in Chechnya, which she excoriated; or elements of the Russian military in Chechnya, some of whom Politkovskaya had helped put in jail. And why would the murder have happened on Putin's birthday? Cornered a few days later while on a trip to Germany, Putin had reacted defensively. Politkovskaya's death, he said, would do more harm to Russia than her reporting ever did. When, three weeks afterward, an F.S.B. defector was poisoned in London by a rare radioactive isotope, one opposition journalist even took it to be a demonstration of sorts, a way of saying, Here's what a government-sponsored killing actually looks like.

By all accounts, Putin wanted the Politkovskaya killers found, and the investigators were not without clues. Politkovskaya's entryway had a video camera, and her building was next door to the Moscow headquarters of VTB, the country's second-largest bank; all told, there were eight video cameras in the vicinity of the crime. In the days before the killing, they had captured a beat-up green Lada station wagon circling Politkovskaya's building. On October 7th, they recorded the Lada parking around the corner at 2:24 P.M. After an hour and a half, a man emerges from it, walks toward Politkovskaya's building with a jacket wrapped around his left hand, and then enters. The man is thin and wears a baseball cap that shields his face. A few minutes later, a camera shows Politkovskaya approaching the building with her grocery bag, rummaging in her purse for her keys, and going in. Less than a minute later, the man in the baseball cap walks out.

Investigators were able to determine that the owner of the Lada was a native of Chechnya named Rustam Makhmudov. He was the nephew of a well-known mobster and had been wanted by federal authorities since 1997 for kidnapping; for most of that time, he lived in Moscow under an assumed name. Despite being on the run, Makhmudov had interesting friends--in particular, an F.S.B. agent and a former police detective with a federal brief (the equivalent of an F.B.I. agent). At this point, the investigators seemed to catch a break: a colleague of the detective came forward to testify that in the fall of 2006, just weeks before Politkovskaya was killed, the former detective had offered to forgive a large debt that the colleague owed if he carried out surveillance on her.

In August, 2007, ten months after the murder, the arrests began: Rustam Makhmudov had disappeared, but police arrested the F.S.B. agent, the former police detective, and nine others, including three of Rustam's brothers. The Russian prosecutor general held a press conference at which he announced that the case had been solved. At first, investigators fingered the youngest of the Makhmudov brothers, Tamerlan, as the shooter, but Tamerlan was able to establish that he had been in Chechnya in the fall of 2006. But cell-phone records established that Rustam's two other brothers had been in the vicinity of the crime when it happened. What's more, the pattern of their calls was suspicious. Investigators knew from the bank cameras that the shooter had left the green Lada and entered Politkovskaya's building at 3:55 P.M. They now found that at 3:52 P.M. the two brothers had had a cell-phone conversation for a few seconds. The killer left the building at 4:07 P.M. Another short phone call between the brothers took place at 4:08 P.M. The investigators concluded that the shooter was Rustam, and that his two brothers served as his driver and lookout.

That, anyway, was the story the prosecution took to court in mid-November, when the trial began. By then, seven of the original suspects had been released, leaving the two brothers, the former police detective, and the F.S.B. agent. Curiously, the F.S.B. agent, Pavel Ryaguzov, was not on trial for the murder; he was accused of beating a travel agent and extorting money from him in 2002. This case, which had been dropped by the authorities years earlier, was picked up again and put before the court. Ostensibly because both cases involved the former police detective, a man named Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, the travel-agent trial was folded into the Politkovskaya trial, and so for three months the two young Chechens and the two members of the law-enforcement community sat together in a yellow steel cage.