MOSCOW, October 7 (RIA Novosti) – A memorial plaque was unveiled Monday in Moscow to commemorate crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya on the seventh anniversary of her murder.
Politkovskaya, who was 48 years old when she was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building, was a vocal critic of the Kremlin and the conduct of the government’s military campaigns and human rights abuses in the war-scarred republic of Chechnya.
Politkovskaya’s children Ilya and Vera, her sister Yelena, and Novaya Gazeta newspaper editor Dmitry Muratov were among those attending Monday’s unveiling ceremony.
The bronze memorial outside the offices of Novaya Gazeta, where she worked, features a portrait of the reporter and three sheets of paper torn from a notebook.
Muratov said in a speech that he hoped a fourth bronze sheet would be one day added to the plaque to announce that the mastermind behind the murder had been found and convicted.
A group of men suspected of the journalist’s killing are currently on trial.
The protracted trial was postponed until October 8 due to a medical quarantine regime being imposed at a detention facility housing one of the defendants, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov.
Aside from Khadzhikurbanov, the remaining four suspects are the brothers Rustam, Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov, and their uncle Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, who is accused of organizing the murder at the behest of an unidentified individual for $150,000.
One suspect, former police officer Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, was convicted in connection with the killing in a separate trial in December 2012.
He reached a plea bargain with investigators and has testified against the other suspects in the case.
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