Reporters Without Borders “totally supports” the decision by murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s family to appeal against a judge’s rejection of its request for the case against three alleged accomplices to be sent back to the prosecutor’s office for further investigation jointly with the investigation into all other people suspected of a role in her murder.

The appeal, announced yesterday by Politkovskaya family lawyer Anna Stavitskaya, will have the effect of suspending Moscow military court judge Nikolai Tkachuk’s decision on 7 August to go ahead with the retrial of the three alleged accomplices. The family’s request for a postponement for the purposes of further investigation was backed by both defence lawyers and prosecutors.

“The only way to clear up this murder is to investigate all aspects of the case together,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The abuses and irregularities that marked the original trial of the alleged accomplices were so glaring that the military court’s decision to press ahead with the retrial only made sense if the real aim was to cover up the truth about Politkovskaya’s death.”

Vera Politkovskaya and Ilya Politkovskiy, photo Novaya Gazeta

In an interview yesterday for the RIA news agency, Stavitskaya said the family felt it was vital to combine the two parts of the case, the investigation into the accomplices, on the one hand, and the investigation into the alleged gunman and the alleged mastermind or masterminds, on the other.

The retrial of the three alleged accomplices opened before a military court in Moscow on 5 August. It was ordered after the supreme court ruled on 25 June in favour of an appeal by prosecutors against their acquittal by a jury on 19 February.

An outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin who covered Chechnya and the rest of the Russian Caucasus for the Moscow-based biweekly Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lobby of her Moscow apartment building on 7 October 2006. She was the third Novaya Gazeta journalist to die violently. Anastasia Baburova became the fourth on 19 January of this year, shortly after joining the newspaper.

Novaya Gazeta announced on 12 August that it was suspending coverage of Chechnya until further notice. The announcement follows a wave of killings in the region, including the 15 July murder of Natalia Estemirova, the human rights organisation Memorial’s representative in Grozny, who used to help Politkovskaya and also wrote for Novaya Gazeta herself.

Read the report of the recent Reporters Without Borders fact-finding visit to the North Caucasus