Russian journalist slain by gunman

MOSCOW – Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist whose byline defined the fading craft of investigative and crusading reporting in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, was gunned down and killed Saturday in the lobby of her apartment building in central Moscow.

Politkovskaya, 48, was renowned for her probes of the brutality of Russia’s military campaign in Chechnya as well as the banality of corruption permeating Russian life, from the remote provinces to the bright lights of Moscow.

Her reporting often clashed with official versions of such events as the hostage crisis at a theater in Moscow in 2002 and the bloody end of a school siege in Beslan in 2004.

She was a harsh critic of Putin’s rule and was working on a story about torture in Chechnya, where a Kremlin-backed strongman has all but routed a separatist movement that sparked two bloody wars, but at a cost to Russia that has yet to be measured.

The article was to be published Monday, according to her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, one of the few independent media outlets in a country where much of the press is apprehensive if not directly controlled by central authorities or regional power brokers.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev became a minority shareholder in the newspaper this summer.

“It is a savage crime against a professional and serious journalist and a courageous woman,” Gorbachev told the Russian news agency Interfax. “It is a blow to the entire democratic, independent press.”

The Kremlin issued no immediate comment on the killing.

The attack was the highest-profile killing of a journalist in Russia since July 2004, when Paul Klebnikov, an American editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was gunned down outside his office. Twelve journalists have been killed since Putin came to power in 2000, and most of the cases remain unsolved.

Politkovskaya was shot twice, once in the head. The weapon was thrown at her feet, according to Vitaly Yaroshevsky, deputy editor in chief of her newspaper. He said police obtained a surveillance tape from a camera on the street, and authorities described the attack as contract killing, which they said was carried out by a young man dressed in black.

“There is no doubt she was killed for her professional activities,” said Igor Yakovenko, general secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists. “She was an absolutely hard-edged person and honest journalist who tackled the toughest subjects.”

Politkovskaya’s newspaper said it would conduct an investigation of the killing.