Grachev, a 72-year-old retired colonel and local deputy, was publisher, editor and most likely the main if not the only journalist for the newspaper Solnechnogorskiy Forum. The paper has no website and is not even listed among local newspapers on the town’s main web resources, so in other circumstances this attack could have gone unnoticed.

But if the assailants were hoping not to cause a sensation, they’ve chosen the wrong time. The story of Mikhail Beketov, publisher and editor-in-chief of opposition newspaper Khimkinskaya Prabvda, who was beaten nearly to death in November, continues to make national and international headlines. Not to mention the murders of Beketov’s lawyer Stanislav Markelov and young journalist Anastasiya Baburova from Novaya Gazeta in the centre of Moscow last month.

Moreover, the Solnechnogorsk attack happened just as Interior Ministry officials were declaring that the majority of murders of journalists are not related to their professional activity. ‘Most often these are domestic crimes. The percentage of journalists killed for their publications and investigations is relatively low,’ Valery Gribakin from the Russian Interior Ministry public relations department recently said.

Colleagues say Grachev’s paper was critical of the authorities, and exposed corruption. The next issue is due on 10 February, and is believed to carry more revelations ahead of March’s elections.

‘If we look at Grachev’s newspaper from the point of view of international journalism standards, we may find his stories not very objective,’ one local reporter told Index on Censorship. ‘But today opposition is itself a rare phenomenon, especially in towns like ours, and this is his main value. His newspaper is the only oppositional media in our region.’

Various observers agree that the attack was aimed at putting Grachev out of action at least until 1 March — election day for many Russian regions. It is hard to predict how those attacks against journalists will affect the electoral choices of local communities.

It will be recalled that Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in the lift of her apartment block on 7 October 2006, was the best-known journalist on Novaya Gazeta, exposing human rights violations in Chechnya. And her murder followed those of her colleagues on the paper, Igor Domnikov in 2000, and Yury Shchekochikhin in 2003.

Domnikov’s murderers were only convicted in 2007. Indeed, journalism is a high-risk profession in Russia. Between April 1993 and December 2008 up to 70 journalists were killed for their work or went missing; many more were the victims of work-related assaults. Many of the perpetrators have escaped justice, in a context of complete, or increasingly, partial impunity.

The profession of lawyer has not been so dangerous, but Markelov had a very high profile. He worked closely with Anna Politkovskaya, for example on the ‘Cadet case’ in which the Chechen Zelimkhan Murdalov was tortured to death by special forces police. There is speculation that Markelov knew the name of Politkovskaya’s murderer.

Most strikingly, Markelov represented the family of the Chechen girl Elza (Kheda) Kungaeva, who in 2000 at the age of 18 was raped and murdered by Colonel Yury Budanov. At his first trial Budanov was acquitted on the basis of psychiatric evidence that he was temporarily insane at the time. But Markelov secured a forensic review from the London clinical psychologist Stuart Turner, who in a report which Anna Politkovskaya published in Novaya Gazeta on 23 January 2003, advised that Budanov was ‘healthy, and dangerous’. This helped to secure Budanov’s conviction and sentence to ten years in prison at a re-trial. But, on 14 January, 2009 Budanov was released on parole. Shortly before his murder, Markelov had conducted a news conference protesting at this decision, and demanding that the authorities resume the prosecution.

Despite taking cases for Chechens who suffered at the hands of the authorities, Markelov was a hero in Chechnya. On 20 January 2009, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov awarded Markelov a posthumous medal ‘for services to the Chechen Republic’, and tens of thousands demonstrated in the Chechen capital, Grozny.

Yet there have been a number of recent murders connected with Chechnya. On 15 January 2009, Umar Ismailov, a 27-year-old Chechen exile and fierce critic of Ramzan Kadyrov was shot dead in Vienna, using very similar methods.

Furthermore, Markelov and Baburova were both left-wing and anti-fascist activists. He had defended the anti-fascist group Anti-Fa, and she had been hired by the paper to write about neo-Nazis, and quoted Markelov in her articles. In April 2004, he was attacked in the Moscow Metro by five skinheads, who beat him up, shouting nationalist slogans, and denouncing his work against Budanov. Anti-fascist activity too has become very dangerous. In October 2008, neo-fascist skinheads kicked 16-year-old Olga Rukosyla to death in Irkutsk and stabbed 27-year-old Fyodor Filatov to death in Moscow. In January 2009, the young leftist Anton Stradimov was beaten to death in Moscow. Racist violence is monitored by the excellent Sova Centre, which publishes regular updates on its website in Russian and English.

Speculation as to the identity of the murderer is rife. Police have already described the murders as a ‘contract killing’. Yet, as several commentators insist, it seems highly unlikely that Budanov or those close to him are involved. Moreover, this was probably not a neo-fascist or skinhead killing, since their victims are usually beaten or stabbed to death.

The daily Izvestia offers another possible explanation. The killer carried out his assassination on a busy street in broad daylight. He did not drop his gun, but calmly walked into a nearby Metro station. And the ‘Makarov’ pistol is standard police issue. Was he a police officer? The police could have had a grudge against Markelov. In April 2008 there was a brawl in Sokolniki police station in Moscow. Five youths were beaten up, but were charged with assaulting police officers. One of the youths was represented by Markelov, who succeeded in having charges pressed against police. On the day of the murder, the case was at its peak.

The General Prosecutor of the Russian Federation, Yury Chaika, and the Head of the Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin, have promised that the murder investigation will be lead by them personally.

While a final judgment would be premature, we are entitled to ask whether this will be yet another example of impunity for those responsible. In any event, ultimate responsibility for the state of affairs in which murder and intimidation are so horrifyingly commonplace must be laid on those in political power in Russia.

I actually laughed, ‘Stas killed? Get out of here! I’ll call him right away to inform him that he’s effectively dead. No worries.’ When pushing the buttons on my phone I automatically recalled a God awful scare a couple of weeks earlier, when news agencies reported the alleged killing of Victor Shenderovich, an immensely talented and funny independent journalist. His family and friends almost had a heart-attack before Shenderovich managed to reassure them that the whole thing was nothing but a provocation. So, here is another one… Come on, Stas, pick up the bloody phone… But the long beeps went on interminably.

Markelov was shot dead around three in the afternoon on Prechistenka Street in the heart of Moscow. Prechistinka is always lively, with heavy traffic and pedestrians rushing about. The killing was witnessed by many and even recorded on one of those surveillance video-cameras, which are common in central Moscow. Markelov was walking towards the metro from his own press conference where he had spoken about the terrible case of Yuri Budanov, a Russian military officer who had brutally killed a young Chechen woman, Elza (Kheda) Kungaeva back in 2000. Markelov represented Kungaeva’s family in court and it is largely owing to his efforts that Budanov was finally given a ten-year prison term in 2003. At that time, with thousands of the dead and disappeared and absolute impunity for perpetrators in Chechnya, this seemed like a miracle. On 15 January 2009, however, Badanov was released on parole. Markelov believed the granting of parole to be unlawful and promised to take the matter all the way to the European Court of Human Rights.

Walking alongside Markelov was Anastaysia (Nastya) Baburova, an intern for Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s leading independent paper, whose star correspondent and human rights champion, Anna Politkovskaya, died in a contract killing in October 2006. Markelov worked to seek justice for some of the most blatant cases of abuses in Chechnya that Politkovskaya wrote about. After Anna’s murder he continued cooperating with Novaya Gazeta. When the gun-shot resounded and Stas fell to the ground, his head bleeding, Nastya saw the hitman and ran after him. Maybe she thought she could stop him. Or, even more likely, she did not think but did it impulsively, not able to bear the very idea of his escaping justice. The killer raised his gun again and shot her in the head. Several hours later, Nastya died in the hospital.

On 20 January, at noon, around 300 people, crushed by shock and sadness, came to Prechistenka St to lay flowers at the site of the killing. Next to the heap of carnations and roses there were lit candles, hand-made posters, and portraits of Stas and Nastya. On those photos they looked so young — But then Nastya was only 25 and Stas 34. He had two children, the youngest still a baby.

For victims of human rights abuses in Chechnya, Markelov’s name was synonymous with hope for justice. Markelov fought in court against numerous perpetrators in human rights abuses in Chechnya, not only Budanov. Among his clients was the Murdalov family, whose son was tortured and forcibly disappeared by Russian police in 2001 — another case made famous by Politkovskaya. Markelov also represented Mokhmadsalakh Masaev, a Chechen who said he was held in a secret prison in Tsenteroi, the native village of President Ramzan Kadyrov of Chechnya, for more than four months in 2006-2007 and subjected to inhuman treatment. Masaev was abducted in the Chechen capital, Grozny, on 3 August 2008, several weeks after Novaya Gazeta published an interview in which he accused Kadyrov of running illegal prisons in Chechnya.

Several critics of the authorities in Russia, particularly those who sought justice for torture, abductions and extrajudicial executions in the North Caucasus, have lost their lives in the past six months. On 13 January, Umar Israilov, a Chechen who had filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights alleging that he had been tortured by Kadyrov, was shot dead in Vienna Magomed Yevloyev, the owner of Ingushetiya.Ru website, which reported on human rights abuses during counterterrorist operations in Ingushetia, a republic in the North Caucasus which borders Chechnya, was killed in a police car on 31 August, 2008, after he was taken in for questioning by police at Magas airport in Ingushetia. But Markelov’s killing truly evokes the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. The message these killers are sending clearly is, if you try to hold abusers to account you risk your life.

Like in the old nursery rhyme about ‘ten little Indians,’ the most vocal critics of the Russian government are disappearing one after the other. And unless Russia’s international partners open their eyes to the situation and push Moscow to ensure the security of people like Markelov, who are fighting for justice in Russia, soon ‘there shall be none’.

Tanya Lokshina is a Russia Researcher for Human Rights Watch in Moscow