A man holds a portrait of Anna Politkovskaya at a memorial meeting.
Photo: Кирилл Тулин
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Politkovskaya Murder Given Special Status
The murder of Novaya gazeta newspaper staff reporter Anna Politkovskaya has been taken under the personal control of head of the Prosecutor General's Office special investigative unit Sergey Ivanov. “Considering the complexity and resonance of the criminal case… we decided to put one more investigative group on it,” Ivanov explained to Kommersant. “The head of the group that began the investigation will still be Petros Garibyan and the head of the second group will be another investigator from the department of especially serious cases. I will personally lead the brigade.” Ivanov characterized the change as a “work procedure.”
Ivanov followed Prosecutor General Yury Chaika when the latter came from the Justice Ministry in the summer of last year. He succeeded Vladimir Lysenko, who was dismissed last September. He is in charge of 56 investigators, 20 of whom have the rank of general. Under Ivanov, the department has investigated the murder of deputy chairman of the Central Bank Andrey Kozlov and the new case against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.
Lawyers for the suspects in the case think the changes are related to the scandal that arose after Chaika declared the case practically solved. Two of the 11 people arrested in the case were later released and it was revealed that two more, FSB Col. Pavel Ryaguzov and former Department to Combat Organized Crime (Russian abbreviation UBOP) staff member Sergey Khadzhikurbanov were charged with extortion, kidnapping, illegal searches and abuse of office in 2002, unrelated to the Politkovskaya case.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 05, 2007
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