The editor of Novotya Gazeta, the newspaper that employed slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, said the identity of her killer is known, but not that of whoever might have ordered her murder.
The organizer is free,” the paper’s editor in chief, Dmitry A. Muratov, said in an interview. “This crime cannot be considered solved.”
The new details shed further light on a case that has drawn international scrutiny, and suggested that a degree of progress has been made in an investigation that Ms. Politkovskaya’s friends and supporters worry has been stalled and undermined by internal disarray.
Ms. Politkovskaya, a tireless critic of the Kremlin and of President Vladimir V. Putin, was an advocate for victims of human rights abuses, especially those from the two wars in Chechnya since 1994. She was shot multiple times with a pistol at the entrance to her apartment building on Oct. 7, 2006.
The killing was one in a string of murders of journalists in Russia. It drew international condemnation and demands for a vigorous investigation.
In the year since, it has been framed as a challenge to Mr. Putin’s legacy — an example of the criminality, corruption and culture of impunity beneath the surface of the partial recovery of Russia’s economy and of the Kremlin’s confidence that have accompanied Mr. Putin’s rule.
The case has proved a challenge to Novaya Gazeta as well. Long a sharp critic of Russia’s government, the paper has cooperated closely with federal investigators and withheld publishing many details of the prosecutors’ work and the newspaper’s own parallel investigation.
On Friday, as editors and reporters put the last touches on a special edition of the newspaper to mark the anniversary of the killing, Mr. Muratov said the report would disclose important new information. But it would not be a full accounting of what the editors know.
Instead, Mr. Muratov said, he was focused on helping prosecutors glean the remaining facts required to arrest the gunman and the man who hired him.