7 Aug 2009 | Digital Freedom, Index Index, minipost
Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told technology website CNET News that denial-of-service internet attacks which disrupted Twitter, Facebook and Live Journal services yesterday were targeted specifically at a Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu. “It was a simultaneous attack targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” he told the website. The blogger has told the Guardian that he blames the attack on the Kremlin. Today marks one year since the war between Russia and Georgia over the South Ossetia region. Read more here
7 Aug 2009 | Index Index, minipost
A Russian court in Moscow refused a request from the family of Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya to halt a retrial of three men accused of being accomplices in her murder. Lawyers for the family of Politkovskaya, who was gunned down outside her apartment in 2006, had asked for the case to be returned to prosecutors and merged with an investigation into the mastermind behind the murder. The trial will resume in September. Read more here
5 Aug 2009 | Index Index, minipost
The retrial of three men allegedly involved in the murder Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya opens before a military court today (5 August) in Moscow. They are former Moscow police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, who is accused of helping to organise the contract-style killing, and two Chechen brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, who are accused of being accessories. They are being retried because prosecutors appealed successfully against their acquittal by a jury last February. But the main protagonists of Politkovskaya’s murder will not be in court tomorrow. They are the alleged the trigger-man, Rustam Makhmudov, who is on the run and believed to be abroad, and those who contracted the killing, whose identity is still unknown.
Read more here
31 Jul 2009 | Index Index, minipost
A Russian anti-corruption activist has been attacked by a group of men who shot him in the mouth with a stun gun. Albert Pchelintsev is the head of “Against Corruption, Lies and Dishonour,” a group which investigates corruption by officials working in the local government of Khimki. According to colleagues, Pchelintsev has repeatedly received threatening phone calls with promises to “have his tongue cut off” and “his mouth gagged”. Read more here
