Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [97]
All this, however, is being extended to Lapin. He enjoys the sympathy of the Prosecutor’s Office, the understanding of the court, he has a lawyer, appreciative colleagues, and as a result of their efforts he is at large.
We await a prompt reply from Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov: are these actions by members of the Prosecutor’s Office in accordance with the law? Why does the reply need to be prompt? Because at any moment it may become too late. There is a major problem in Russia with officers who have served in Chechnya. The most modest estimates suggest that The Cadet has almost half a million comrades-in-arms in Russia, a large city’s worth of Cadets.
From the Editors:
It was The Cadet who, on more than one occasion, threatened to kill our columnist Anna Politkovskaya, after which she was first placed under the protection of the Interior Ministry, and subsequently obliged to move abroad. The Cadet acknowledged these facts without showing any remorse. We demand that […] Citizen Lapin should be re-arrested as we are certain that the life of the witnesses and of our columnist are again threatened.
HOLES IN THE PROSECUTORS’ SAFES: IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS FROM THE CADET CASE GO MISSING
August 8, 2002
A major problem relating to Criminal Case No. 15004 […] has been discovered. Documents of fundamental importance have disappeared. Although they were attached to the criminal case and had been numbered and indexed in the requisite manner, placed in the safe of Investigator Ivanteyev of the Board of the Prosecutor-General’s Office in the North Caucasus, a safe located in Essentuki and kept locked, with a key in the custody only of Investigator Ivanteyev, nevertheless …
To tell the truth, the latest disappearance of documents is not unexpected. The way the case has been conducted for several months now suggested it would arrive at court laundered and “optimised” for the benefit of Lapin. That seemed to be the opinion of the members of the Prosecutor’s Office in Essentuki too.
But surprise, surprise! Copies of the missing documents are secure in the possession of Novaya gazeta whose safes, unlike those of the Prosecutor’s Office in Essentuki, have no holes through which papers can slip for which certain criminals, as the unforgettable film sleuth Gleb Zheglov used to say, “will give anything.” We kept copies in case of just such an untoward accident. Not everybody in the Nizhnevartovsk Militia is on Lapin’s side. Don’t ask how we came by these copies. For the time being, until the court hearings, we can only reply that they came from the bowels of the earth.
And so, dear reader, we invite you to view photographs of members of the Khanty-Mansiysk Militia Unit rampaging through Grozny, and as they appear in the photographs attached to Case No. 15004, identifying The Cadet’s accomplices.
Look closely at these faces. There is nothing unusual about them. They look like anybody else. They are the people around us. They are like us. Yet these faces belong to people who tortured, or killed, or who were jacks of all trades both torturing and murdering and blowing to bits the bodies of those they had murdered.
Why did they do it? Don’t look for special reasons: they just did. They hated their victims. Hatred is the mantra of the Khanties, sanctioned from the very pinnacle of the state. For the greater glory of their mantra, these people were pulverised (not just figuratively, but literally), dozens of them just like themselves. We would probably never have printed these mug shots of the Khanties, not least because they are part of a criminal case and should not be made public. The Prosecutor’s Office, however, has left us no alternative.
In addition to the photographs, records