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
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.
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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
Andrei Kulagin, a Russian human rights activist, has been found dead in a quarry on the outskirst of Petrozavodsk more than two months after he went missing. Kulagin was the branch head of the rights organisation Spravedlivost (Justice) in Karelia, 600 miles north of Moscow. He was last seen alive on 14 May. “There is no doubt that he was murdered,” said the orgnaisations director.
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