Slain reporter's unfinished torture story published

Anna Politkovskaya’s newspaper today published an unfinished article on torture in Chechnya that the journalist had been working on when she was killed.

The article, in Novaya Gazeta newspaper, accompanied by graphic images taken from a video, described the alleged torture by Kremlin-backed Chechen security services of two young men branded terrorists.

The video was apparently shot by the people committing the torture, and four pictures reproduced in the paper were accompanied by a Russian translation of the torturers’ expletive-filled conversation in Chechen about how hard it was to kill the victims.

The photos, which were also reproduced in colour on the paper’s website, showed the head and torso of a camouflage-clad man lying in a pool of blood, apparently dead, a man’s face covered in rivulets of blood, and apparently the same man’s body slumped over with what the caption described as a knife sticking out of the area around the ear.

“Are we fighting legally against lawlessness?” Politkovskaya asked in the article. “Or are we thrashing them with our own lawlessness?”

The story included written testimony from a Chechen who was extradited from Ukraine to a Chechen government office in Grozny, where he was allegedly hung by his hands and feet from a pole and beaten, subjected to electric shock and suffocated with a bag over his head to force him to confess to killings he said he did not commit.

He made the confession to journalists, whom he told – on his interrogators’ orders – that his injuries were sustained during an escape attempt, the article said.

“When prosecutors and judges work not for the law and punishment of the guilty, but on political orders and in pursuit of anti-terrorist aims that are pleasing to the Kremlin, then criminal cases multiply like hot cakes,” Politkovskaya wrote.

Some colleagues thought Politkovskaya’s killing on Saturday could have been connected with the story. She had told Radio Liberty last week that she was working on a story on torture, and that she was serving as a witness in criminal investigations into allegations of torture in Chechnya.

Chechen prime minister Ramzan Kadyrov repeated his denial of having had any part in her killing.

“I don’t kill women and never have. Women should be loved; for us Chechens, a woman is sacred,” he said. “I think that those who ordered Anna Politkovskaya’s murder wanted to blacken me.”