A BBC feature on the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and what her son thinks about the 2006 contract-style killing.
From the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes:
It is a strange experience standing in the exact spot where someone has been murdered.
I was not in Russia on the day two years ago when Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the entrance hall of her apartment building.
But standing in that spot this week suddenly brought home to me the chilling nature of her death.
Speak to anyone who knew Anna and you hear the same words - honest, dignified, thorough, passionate, fearless.
On that grey October day Anna was on her way to work at the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
As she stepped out of the lift on the ground floor she was shot four times at close range in the head and chest.
A pistol and the empty bullet casings were left beside her body. It was no random murder. It was a contract killing. ...
There is a trial of sorts going on at the moment into the Politkovskaya killing, but it's currently going on behind closed doors. The three men on trial are seen as lowly players, part of a gang that carried out the murder. But who was above them?
No-one has followed the investigation closer than her son Ilya Politkovsky. He says it is clear to him that members of Russia's powerful internal security service, the FSB, were involved.
"I am confident that the security service as an institution was not involved," he said. "But it's also clear a lot of the people in the gang were serving officers from the FSB. They committed crimes alongside the gangsters."
The picture he paints is extremely disturbing.
It suggests that whoever wanted Anna Politkovskaya dead was able to hire a group of serving FSB officers to plan the killing. And that they, in turn, hired a group of Chechen gangsters to carry out the murder.
Ask ordinary Russians about this and they tend to shrug their shoulders. Few seem surprised at the idea.
The state-run media, meanwhile, declares itself well satisfied.
Without a hint of irony it declares the trial proof that the justice system works - that such crimes do not go unpunished in Russia.
If the FSB was involved, where on earth would they have gotten the idea it would be okay to kill a pesky journalist?
Apropos of nothing, here is what then-President Vladimir Putin had to say three days after her death, according to an Oct. 10, 2006 BBC story:
... Top-level Russian officials were nowhere to be seen (at Politkovskaya's funeral). Their answer came later when President Putin, speaking in Germany, described Politkovskaya's influence in Russia as "negligible".
He even hinted the murder might have been a plot by Moscow's enemies - who, he said, were prepared to "sacrifice people" to tarnish the Russian state in the eyes of the outside world.
And remember what the Putinator told a French journalist who had annoyed him in 2002 by asking questions about human rights and Chechnya:
''If you are determined to become a complete Islamic radical and are ready to undergo circumcision, then I invite you to Moscow. We are multi-confessional. We have experts in this sphere as well. I will recommend to conduct the operation so that nothing on you will grow again.''
Again, if FSB thugs were behind Politkovskaya's death, where would they get the idea?
Another post that might be worthwhile for you to read (if you're new to this subject) is this one from Nov. 10, 2006 -- Anna Politkovskaya's fatal error in judgment