Moscow murders are new blow against press freedom

The latest edition of Russia's Novaya Gazeta features a darkly depressing interview, given by the crusading human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov to a young journalist at the paper, Anastasia Baburova.

Both the interviewer and the interviewee are now dead. Markelov, who worked on a whole host of high-profile cases involving Chechnya, media freedom, police abuse and other sensitive issues, was shot dead in Moscow on Monday afternoon (above), shortly after giving a press conference.

He was accompanied by Baburova, a 25-year-old intern at the newspaper, who reportedly chased after the assassin and was also shot. She died later in hospital.

Amidst the wars over gas and Gaza, not to mention Obama-mania, two more political killings in Russia have passed under the radar.

Additionally, neither of the dead was known in the West, unlike Anna Politkovskaya, another Novaya Gazeta reporter who was shot in 2006. But the killings, if anything, are even more disturbing than Politkovskaya's.

Back then, the killers shadowed the journalist for days, waited inside the entrance to her apartment block and shot her as she was entering the lift. What's extraordinary about Monday's killings is their brazenness. They were committed in broad daylight on a busy central Moscow street, a few minutes' walk from the Kremlin.

"The killers have no fear, because they know they won't be punished," read Novaya Gazeta's front page on Wednesday, above a photograph of Markelov's corpse lying on the street next to a congealed puddle of bloody snow.

Novaya Gazeta is one of the last remaining free papers in Russia, publishing hard-hitting investigative journalism on a range of subjects which most other newspapers and all Russian television stations prefer to avoid. Markelov had worked with and for the paper on a number of cases, including the Politkovskaya case.

Novaya Gazeta is part-owned by the Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, who gave a press conference in Moscow on Thursday morning to discuss the deal, finalised this week, to take over London's Evening Standard.

He said that he and Novaya Gazeta's editorial staff were "certain" that Markelov's killing was linked to the work the lawyer did for Novaya Gazeta, and he said it couldn't be excluded that Baburova had been deliberately targeted too.

"We have some evidence about the killings but we're not going to release it now," said Lebedev. "We're going to sit down in the editorial offices and discuss the best move, because we're worried about the safety of the journalist involved."

Back in 2006, when Vladimir Putin was asked for his reaction to the murder of Politkovskaya, he said her influence was "minimal" and that "her death caused more harm to Russia than her articles ever did".

What has Russia's new 'liberal' president Dmitry Medvedev, a lawyer himself who has promised to introduce rule of law and more civil liberties, said about this week's murders? Absolutely nothing.

"It's pretty shameful that there has been no reaction from those in charge," said Lebedev today. "But given what was said about Politkovskaya, perhaps it's for the best."