From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 9/6/2007 2:21 AM Russia and the usual suspects Publication time: 3 September 2007, 17:48 It certainly would be welcome news if, in fact, Russian investigators have arrested 10 people involved in the murder of the crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and perhaps also the killing of an American journalist, Paul Klebnikov, and the deputy head of the Russian Central Bank, Andrei Kozlov. That is what Russia's prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, announced the other day. But forgive us if we remain skeptical. There's just too much of the "usual suspects" here, and Russia's criminal justice system is too blatantly under the thumb of President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin, for us to accept at face value that due process of law is at work.
It is certainly possible that the murders involved the suspects Mr. Chaika described - professional Chechen hit men, moonlighting police officers and a rogue intelligence officer. There are plenty of these types in Russia, and Russians would readily accept that they were hired to commit the killings.
Mr. Chaika's bombshell was his suggestion that the mastermind behind the hits was an exile interested in stirring up chaos and resentment against Mr. Putin. That happens to confirm what Mr. Putin himself suggested only three days after Ms. Politkovskaya's murder last Oct. 7 - that there were fugitives from Russian justice bent on sacrificing somebody "in order to create a wave of anti-Russian feeling in the world."
The two men who most obviously fit the description were the oligarch Boris Berezovsky and the Chechen leader Akhmed Zakayev, both in self-exile in London, both fiercely critical of Mr. Putin and both wanted by the Kremlin. Mr. Putin's insinuations, however, didn't go over too well in the West. Blaming the West was a common Soviet ploy whenever anything went dramatically wrong. Western leaders began demanding that Mr. Putin find the real killers of Ms. Politkovskaya and to stop the serial assassinations of his critics. Those demands became louder with the bizarre polonium murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London last November.
Then suddenly the three most notorious assassinations are solved, the masterminds are the very ones Mr. Putin suspected all along, and the police round up the usual Chechens and corrupt cops, with a spy thrown in for added credibility. It may be just as Mr. Chaika said, and if so, we sincerely hope the prosecutor general produces convincing evidence at an open trial and goes on to solve all the other outstanding political assassinations.
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