Today in Moscow a memorial plaque was unveiled in honor of slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Today was the 7th anniversary of the death of the courageous woman who was gunned down on Vladimir’s Putin’s birthday.
Politkovskaya was an award-winning reporter for Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Moscow, of which former Soviet leader Gorbachev is associated. She was investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya along with high-level corruption at the time.
Politkovskaya’s murder galvanized the growing opposition to life under President Putin and it was not until Dmitry Medvedev took over the presidency that investigators began to make headway in the case. Finally in 2012, Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, a former Moscow city policeman was convicted and sentenced to 11 years of following Politkovskaya and then giving the killer a weapon. Pavlyuchenkov struck a plea bargain later for a reduced sentence and has never revealed who ordered the murder.
Critics say that the plea deal was useless for finding new information and only served to shorten the sentence of the man loyal to whoever ordered Politkovskaya’s murder.
May God grant her memory eternal!
