O julgamento do assassínio de Anna Politkovskaya - II

- O interrogatório do irmão Dzhabrail -

The first thing you noticed once you'd squeezed yourself onto the press bench at the court was that the defence had a very good lawyer. In fact, they had half a dozen lawyers, most of them men (versus two female prosecutors), but Murad Musaev, who was representing the younger of the Makhmudov brothers, Dzhabrail, spoke for all of them. Musaev, just twenty-five years old, and the scion of a prominent Chechen family - his father, after a career in Chechen law enforcement and government, now lives in Moscow and has a stake in one of Moscow's more successful publishing companies - was trained as a corporate lawyer. In 2007, though, he effectively represented the Chechen victims of a Russian war criminal, and in the past few years he has increasingly found himself working as a defender of Chechen rights. Now, in the Moscow District Military Court, dressed in a fitted gray suit and a striped red shirt, with a white-and-red pocket square, Musaev looked as if he'd just stepped out of Chechen GQ. On January 20th, he and the other lawyers were finally able to question their clients in court.

(O advogado de defesa, Murad Musaev, 'saído da Chechen GQ'. AP)

Dzhabrail went first. A nice-looking young man of twenty-six, with a fairly strong Chechen accent, a mop of black hair, and blue eyes, he was accused of driving the Lada on the day of the murder. He stood up in the yellow cage and leaned his head against the bars 'Tell me', Musaev said, sitting with his back to Dzhabrail, both of them facing the jury, 'do you have much skill and experience with surveillance work?'
'No,' Dzhabrail said.
'Do you have much skill and experience with criminal work?'
Chuckling slightly and shaking his head, Dzhabrail said he did not.

He was born in Chechnya. When the Russian Army invaded in the late 1994, the Makhmudovs escaped to neighbouring Ingushetia. A few years later, Dzhabrail came to Moscow to go to college. He'd done well there, and had written a thesis on the Chechen refugee problem. 'I travelled all over the Caucasus gathering material, I tortured my poor mother with questions', he said. 'My thesis wasn't eighty pages, it was three hundred pages! All my professors said I should keep working on it, that I should go to grad school.' He had interviewed people in Moscow. 'There's this place called Memorial,' he said, referring to the most revered human-rights organisation in Russia. 'I went there'. Had he read Politkovskaya's articles on Chechnya? He wasn't sure, but he suspected that they were in the mound of material he'd gathered for his thesis. In any case, he said, 'I knew she was a very decent and upright person.'

(O irmao mais novo, Dzhabrail, sabia que Politkovskaya era uma pessoa muito decente'. AP)

This is not what anyone had expected to hear from the gateway driver. He'd graduate from college, returned briefly to Chechnya, and then went back to Moscow in the fall of 2006 to try to start grad school. He passed the first two exams but then the third was English. 'I was ashamed to show up,' Dzhabrail admitted. 'I wasn't prepared.' That fall, he spent a lot of his time seeing other members of the Chechen diaspora - a close-knit community ravaged by two wars, discriminated against in Moscow, but also involved in much of the city's underground economy. 'Mostly what I was doing was meeting up people who were relatives and grownups who had people in jail. Everyone's relatives were in jail. I met with them all the time and they told me about their problems.' Musaev continued his questioning:

Musaev: All right, what can you tell us about the incident in question?
Dzhabrail: What I can tell you is that I was arrested on August 16th and for two weeks they beat me in the head!
Musaev: O.K., O.K., but without the beating on the head. What were you doing on October 7th?
Dzhabrail: I can't remember specifically. I did what I usually do. All my days were the same. I went around Moscow. I met with people. It was like one long day.

Dzhabrail's answers spilled out of him with palpable sincerity, full of digressions and bits of his life philosophy and his education. Musaev knew that the longer he kept talking the more charmed the jury would become. He was resourceful, asking the same questions with a slightly new angle over and over. One of the prosecutors, out of desperation, started leaning over from her chair and staring at the screen of Musaev's laptop. Eventually, Musaev noticed this.
'What?' he said. 'My questions.'
'With the answers.'

Musaev was out of his chair. 'Your Honour!' He'd taken his laptop with him. 'I am tired of this hee-hee and ha-ha, I am tired of these insinuations! Yes, I have notes for my questions, but for the first time in my career I did not rehearse with my client, because I wanted his answers to be natural! Even the most cursory glance at this' - and he planted his Sony Vaio before the judge, Colonel Yevgeny Zuboc - 'will demonstrate that my defendant's answers have nothing in common with what I've written here.
'All right, all right,' Judge Zubov said, waving the computer away.

(Musaev tirou o maior partido da 'empatia' despertada por Dzhabrail. Getty Images)

Eventually, Musaev resumed his questioning. Dzhabrail couldn't remember why he'd called his brother six times on October 7th, 2006, but he knew it wasn't strange. 'I call my brother two, three, five times a day, sometimes twenty times a day' Dzhabrail said. 'If he doesn't answer - I keep calling - what if something happened to him?' The more one listened to Dzhabrail, the more difficult it became to imagine that he had ever been involved in the murder of any living thing. Yet, he could not say what he was doing on October 7th: 'Why should I remember? If I am a normal person and all the days are the same?' If he was innocent, though, why was he in the neighbourhood? If he was not innocent, it meant that the organisers had involved in their plot a young man who shared Politkovskaya's beliefs, had worked on some of the same issues; who was bright, eager, and extremely sweet and personable; who'd known perfectly well that Politkovskaya was a 'very nice and decent person.' Musaev asked him if anyone had ever told him to do harm to Politkovskaya, or participate in a plot to harm her. 'No one who knew me would ask me that,' Dzhabrail said. 'No one who knew me would even talk about such a thing while I was around.'

Final da Segunda Parte