Russian human rights lawyer shot dead

A HUMAN rights lawyer who fought against the early release of a Russian colonel convicted of murdering a Chechen woman was shot dead on a Moscow street yesterday, days after the officer left prison, law enforcement authorities said.

A journalist also was wounded and died later from injuries sustained in the attack, a newspaper editor said.

The broad-daylight slaying of Stanislav Markelov sparked anger among Chechens — already upset by the release last week of Col Yuri Budanov — and prompted an outpouring of grief and ire among Russia’s beleaguered rights activists.

“This is a horrible, frightening crime,” said Tatyana Lokshina of the Human Rights Watch, comparing it to the 2006 slaying of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya — a client of Markelov’s and a fellow enemy of rights abuses in Chechnya and across former President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Markelov, 34, was gunned down in central Moscow near a building where he had just held a news conference, about one kilometre from the Kremlin, said Viktoria Tsyplenkova, a spokeswoman for the Investigative Committee of the Moscow prosecutor’s office.

Markelov was shot in the back of the head at close range by an attacker who followed him after the news conference, wore a stocking-style mask and had a silencer on his gun — clear signs of a planned killing, state-run RIA -Novosti news agency reported, citing an unidentified law enforcement official.

A deputy editor of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, Andrei Lipsky, said freelancer Anastasia Baburova, who had written for the paper, was shot when she tried to intervene after Markelov was shot. She was taken to a hospital, and died later.

Markelov, who represented the family of the 18-year-old Chechen woman Budanov killed in 2000, had told reporters he was considering filing an international court appeal against Budanov’s early release, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported.

The colonel was freed last week with more than a year left in his murder sentence.

Budanov was convicted in 2003 and sentenced to 10 years — including time served — for strangling Heda Kungayeva. He admitted killing her, saying he believed she was a rebel sniper in the Kremlin’s war against Chechen insurgents.

Kungayeva’s father Visa Kungayev said Markelov told him on Friday that he had been threatened with death if he refused to drop the case, the Interfax news agency reported.