A man who had been convicted for his involvement in the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya has reportedly been pardoned after engaging in combat in Ukraine, as stated by his lawyer and local media reports.
Anna Politkovskaya, renowned for her reporting on abuses during Russia’s war in Chechnya in the early years of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, was fatally shot outside her Moscow apartment in 2006.
The murder of Anna Politkovskaya triggered widespread condemnation in the West and underscored the increasing risks faced by journalists reporting in Russia, particularly as Putin tightened control over independent media.
Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former police officer, received a 20-year prison sentence in 2014 for his role in organizing the killing. the murder of investigative
His lawyer, Alexei Mikhalchik, explained, “As a special forces fighter, [Khadzhikurbanov] was enlisted under a contract to participate in a special military operation… When the contract concluded, he was pardoned by presidential decree.”
Khadzhikurbanov was convicted along with four other men from Chechnya, a mostly Muslim region in the northern Caucasus where Russia and its local allies crushed two rebellions, in 1994-96 and, under Putin, in 1999-2009.
In 2018, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg found that, while the authorities had found and convicted a group of men who had directly carried out the contract killing, they had “failed to take adequate investigatory steps to find the person or persons who had commissioned the murder”.
Politkovskaya, who did much of her work for the independent investigative magazine Novaya Gazeta, now banned in Russia, won more than a dozen international prizes for reporting on abuses committed in Chechnya by Russian and allied forces as well as by rebels, despite repeated detentions and death threats.
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