Putin Offers Reassurances After a Killing

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MOSCOW — President Putin made his first public comments on the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in a telephone call to President Bush about 48 hours after she was killed.

Politkovskaya’s death, in the stairwell of her apartment block in central Moscow on October 7, caused outrage around the world, with the U.S. State Department and the White House issuing tributes to her work and calling for a full investigation.

Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika issued a statement Sunday saying he was taking the investigation under his personal control. The Kremlin said nothing until yesterday, when the presidential press service made a statement about the phone call between Messrs. Putin and Bush on North Korea’s nuclear test.

“In the course of the conversation, Vladimir Putin emphasized that the law enforcement organs of Russia will take all necessary measures for the objective investigation into the tragic death of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya,” the statement read.

Politkovskaya concentrated on covering human-rights abuses in the breakaway southern area of Chechnya. Russia has fought two wars with rebels in the region since the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, and she was openly critical of Mr. Putin in connection with the fighting.

“I have wondered a great deal about why I have so got it in for Putin,” she wrote in one of her books, “Putin’s Russia.” She partly answered her own question by saying, “Putin, a product of the country’s murkiest intelligence service, has failed to transcend his origins and stop behaving like a lieutenant-colonel in the Soviet KGB. He is still busy sorting out his freedom-loving fellow countrymen; he persists in crushing liberty just as he did earlier in his career.”

Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper for which Politkovskaya worked since 1999, has offered a reward of $930,000 for information leading to the arrest of her killer.

Russian television stations Sunday showed grainy footage of a young man wearing a baseball cap who was filmed by a security camera in her apartment building. The broadcast said police wanted to question him.

Novaya Gazeta ran a tribute to Politkovskaya in its print edition yesterday after it first appeared on the newspaper’s Web site Sunday. “While there is Novaya Gazeta, her killers will not sleep peacefully,” the article said.


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