Former Russian police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, who was sentenced to twenty years in jail for his position in organizing the 2006 assassination of the distinguished journalist Anna Politkovskaya, has obtained a pardon from President Vladimir Putin after collaborating in Moscow’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Khadzhikurbanov’s lawyer, Aleksei Mikhalchik, on November 14 confirmed media stories saying the Protection Ministry had recruited Khadzhikurbanov to affix the conflict in Ukraine in late 2022. Mikhalchik stated that after serving six months in Ukraine, his shopper was pardoned however continues to serve within the Russian armed forces in Ukraine on a contractual foundation.
In 2014, the Moscow Metropolis Courtroom sentenced Khadzhikurbanov to twenty years in jail on a cost of mediating the group of the homicide of Politkovskaya, a critic of Putin whose dogged reporting uncovered high-level corruption in Russia and rights abuses in Chechnya. She was shot lifeless in her Moscow residence constructing on October 7, 2006.
Two natives of Russia’s North Caucasus area of Chechnya, Rustam Makhmudov and Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, had been subsequently handed life sentences after a jury discovered Makhmudov responsible of capturing Politkovskaya, whereas Gaitukayev was convicted of organizing the assassination. Gaitukayev later died in jail.
One other defendant within the case, former Moscow police officer Denis Pavlyuchenkov, was sentenced to 11 years in jail after he confessed to organizing the surveillance of Politkovskaya earlier than she was murdered.
Khadzhikurbanov pleaded not responsible and insisted that the cost towards him was primarily based on, what he known as, Pavlyuchenkov’s ”false” testimony.
Politkovskaya’s homicide occurred on Putin’s birthday, prompting hypothesis that it was meant as a ”present” to the president.
Novaya gazeta issued a assertion by its workers and Politkovskaya’s kids, Ilya Politkovsky and Vera Politkovskaya, calling the clemency handed to Khadzhikurbanov ”a truth of a monstrous injustice.”
”For us such a ”clemency” shouldn’t be the indication of redemption of guilt and repentance of the assassin. It’s a monstrous truth of injustice and lawlessness, desecration of the reminiscence of the one that was killed for her beliefs {and professional} duties,” the assertion stated.
Russia’s coverage of releasing violent criminals, together with murderers, who serve a tour of obligation in Ukraine has outraged many many households of victims. Russia permitted mercenary teams and the Protection Ministry to recruite criminals for the conflict effort in Ukraine amid an absence of manpower.
Of their assertion, Politkovskaya’s household and Novaya gazeta’s editors stated they weren’t knowledgeable beforehand in regards to the assassin being pardoned, saying it was typical of the state’s dismissive angle towards the case.
”They [still] don’t inform us about their seek for different murderers [of Politkovskaya], specifically those that ordered the killing. That’s as a result of they don’t seek for them. As a result of they cowl them up,” the assertion stated.
In 2018, the European Courtroom of Human Rights dominated that Russia ”had did not take satisfactory investigatory steps to search out the individual or individuals who had commissioned the homicide.”
Politkovskaya was born in New York in 1958, the daughter of a Soviet diplomat from Ukraine.
She was the laureate of quite a few Russian and worldwide awards together with an Amnesty Worldwide World Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2001, a PEN Freedom to Write award in 2002, an Olaf Palme Prize in 2004.
In 2007, she grew to become the primary individual ever to obtain a posthumous UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.