Russia has arrested a former senior police officer suspected of organising the 2006 murder of anti-Kremlin reporter Anna Politkovskaya in exchange for cash, investigators said on Wednesday.
The announcement marks a major development in the long-running case that has so far failed to make any convictions almost five years after the reporter’s death, even though the mastermind of the killing remains unknown.
Retired police lieutenant colonel Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov is suspected of organising the criminal group that carried out the murder as well as obtaining the murder weapon, said the spokesman for the Investigative Committee Vladimir Markin.
“According to the investigation, Pavlyuchenkov received the order to organise the killing of Anna Politkovskaya from an unknown individual in exchange for a monetary reward and gave his agreement,” he said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies.
The arrest, whose timing was not clear, was first announced by the editor-in-chief of Politkovskaya’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper Dmitry Muratov late on Tuesday.
A trenchant critic of the Kremlin, Politkovskaya had won international prizes for her reports accusing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of using the Chechen conflict to strangle democracy while he was president.
Her killing sparked international outrage and underlined the lack of security faced by reporters in Russia who dare to challenge the authorities.
Politkovskaya was shot dead in October 2006 in her apartment block in Moscow and failure of the investigation to secure any convictions has been widely ridiculed in Russia and abroad.
Two Chechen brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, and former police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov were tried for suspected involvement in the killing but were acquitted on a lack of evidence in 2009.
This verdict was then annulled by the supreme court and a new investigation reopened with the same suspects.
Putin famously said in the days after her murder that the killing was “an unacceptable crime that cannot go unpunished” but also described her ability to influence political life in Russia as “insignificant”.
