- Id
- 318
- Date
- 15/07/2009
- First
- Natalya
- Surname
- ESTEMIROVA
- Sex/Age
- F, 50
- Incident
- homicide
- Motive
- J
- Place
- roadside
- Job
- journalist
- Medium
- Federal District Plus
- North Caucasus
- Street, Town, Region
- Ingushetia
- Freelance
- yes
- Local/National
- local / national, Novaya gazeta
- Other Ties
- human rights activist
- Cause of Death
- shot
- Legal Qualification
- 105 (murder)
- Impunity
- investigation
Natalia Estemirova has been murdered. A human rights activist and a journalist, winner of the Anna Politkovskaya Award and the Swedish Parliament Award "The Right to Exist", this courageous woman walked on the razor's edge for a long time, fulfilling the most difficult work of investigating crimes involving torture, executions and disappearances of people in Chechnya.
… "Thousands of Butchers At Large", "Kidnappings Continue in Chechnya", "A Fusillade Autumn", "Chechnya: Generations at War" - those are the headings of some of Natalia's stories in Novaya Gazeta for which she worked as a freelance reporter for a long time. "We were compelled to formally terminate our cooperation because the status of a Novaya Gazeta reporter had become a threat to Natalia; her last few publications were signed by an assumed name," NG deputy editor-in-chief Sergey Sokolov told the Ekho Moskny radio station.
It was N. Estemirova who independently investigated the recent kidnapping of father and son Albekov which ended in Rizvan Albekov's public execution and in the fate of his son Aziz still unknown. Natalia promised to report details of that and other crimes to the Caucasian Knot news agency on July 14.
She is also known to have been one of the few people in Chechnya who took the liberty of not only disagreeing with the republic's president Ramzan Kadyrov but also of arguing with him.
Early on July 15 N. Estemirova was kidnapped in downtown Grozny: unidentified men, ignoring the presence of eyewitnesses, seized the woman, pushed her into a car and drove away. Hours later her body was found in neighboring Ingushetia with bullet wounds in the chest and head.
The killing caused everybody's condemnation. Estemirova's colleagues maintain that the crime was organized by the Chechen force agencies controlled by President Kadyrov. The republic's leader, for his part, has made public a statement saying that the human rights activist's killers "do not deserve to be called human beings; they cannot hope for mercy and must be punished as the most ruthless criminals". RF President Dmitry Medvedev has expressed his indignation and instructed Alexander Batsrykin, head of the Investigations Committee under the Prosecutor General's Office, to take every possible measure to get the crime solved. He also expressed condolences to the victim's family and friends. International human rights organizations, among them the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House and Amnesty International, have urged the Russian authorities to thoroughly investigate Estemirova's assassination and take steps to end the journalists' killings in Russia.
Criminal proceedings have been instituted under Articles 105 ("Homicide") and 222 ("Illegal turnover of arms and ammunition") of the RF Criminal Code. According to Russia's Deputy Interior Minister Arkady Yedelev, several versions are being checked: "One, murder linked with the victim's professional, or, more exactly, public activities. Two, a provocation by armed gang leaders aimed at discrediting the Chechen government and law enforcement bodies. Three, violent robbery. And four, domestic crime."
Domestic crime… Those thugs kidnapped Natalia, tied her up, drove her through all the road blocks and killed her with two fire shots in the heart and one in the head, showing the best of criminal professionalism. And our law enforcers start talking about "domestic crime" again. They seem to be short on versions. Or are they simply unwilling to do their job properly?
…The investigation has been taken under special control by many - the RF Prosecutor General's Office, Deputy Interior Minister A. Yedelev, and even President Kadyrov who promised that the search for the perpetrators would not be limited to an official investigation but will "also be conducted unofficially, in line with the Chechen tradition". And A. Bastrykin has already arrived in Chechnya to coordinate the investigation process.
Meanwhile, Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev has said that "it is crime that is very difficult to solve because it was committed on the territories of two different republics". He pledged that every effort would be taken to track down the killers. Well, we had heard scores of statements to that effect before but can hardly recall a single crime of this kind ever solved in real terms…
GDF digest, 23 July