3 acquitted in '06 killing of Russian journalist

MOSCOW - A Moscow jury ruled unanimously yesterday to acquit three men in the 2006 slaying of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, frustrating state prosecutors' hopes of putting to rest a case that provoked international outrage and cast a shadow over Vladimir V. Putin's Russia.

Politkovskaya, 48, was a strident critic of the Kremlin, and her killing underlined the shrinking freedom allowed dissenters in Russian society. Investigators and colleagues concluded that someone had ordered her death to silence her, and some suspected the hand of state officials in the crime.

But the three men who were tried on murder charges in a cramped courtroom this winter were peripheral figures: two young Chechen brothers accused of acting as a lookout and a driver for the suspected triggerman, who has never been arrested; and a former police investigator accused of organizing logistics for the killing.

By skirting the single most important question - who ordered the killing of Politkovskaya - the proceedings made the case more corrosive.

"If the decision had been otherwise, it would mean that the real criminals, who are somewhere among us, could continue what they were doing," said Murad Musayev, the lawyer defending Dzhabrail Makhmudov, one of the Chechen brothers. "The only way to stop these crimes is to find the real criminals."

The verdict comes exactly one month after another wrenching political killing. On Jan. 19, a masked gunman killed a prominent human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, as he left a press conference a few blocks from the Kremlin.

He then shot Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old reporter for Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper where Politkovskaya worked.

Yesterday's acquittal dims hopes that such crimes will be vigorously investigated, said Tatyana Lokshina, deputy director of the Human Rights Watch Moscow bureau.