(O segundo irmao Makhmudov, Ibragim, era uma personagem menos simpática do que o primeiro. AFP)
After Dzabrail's testimony was finished, it was his brother Ibragim's turn. He was accused of standing on the street about half a mile from Politkovskaya's building and calling Dzabrail when he saw her car drive past. Ibragim, twenty-nine, was a lot less charming than Dzabrail. 'Do you understand what you're accused of?' his lawyer asked him. 'If someone had explained it to me, I'd understand,' Ibragim said. Tall, broad-shouldered, but underweight, with sunker eyes, he did not look well. He'd gone to the same school as Dzabrail, but, as he volunteered, he was no scholar: he'd been kicked out seven times. His lawyer asked if he had ever read Politkovskaya's articles. 'I'm trying to tell you,' Ibragim said. 'I never read anything.'
In the fall of 2006, Ibragim was working odd jobs, driving a taxi, helping out at the Litkino fish market. He could account for much of his time in the months before the crime but could not say what he was doing in Politkovskaya's neighbourhood on the afternoon of October 7th. He'd been seen at a birthday party that night; this he now remembered fondly. 'I came into the café and there was all this food and I said, 'Hey, Happy Birthday! Congratulations!' And then I ate all the food.' When he was asked how it was possible that he could remeber what he'd been doing in the evening and not what he'd been doing during the day, Ibragim though of a joke. 'I'll tell you why: I ate so much food at that birthday party, I forgot everything!'
Everyone laughed, though unhappily. Later in the trial, the lead prosecutor, responding to another outburst of laughter in the court, reminded everyone that there were at a murder trial. Sometimes it felt like a murder trial; most of the time it didn't.
Outside of the courthouse, the country's ongoing financial crisis had put some life back into the tiny government opposition. Its supporters declared the last day in January a 'day of dissent.' Rallies were organised, some permissions were refused, and, as usual, the Kremlin allowed itself some larger counter-rallies. Arrests were made. The next day, a Sunday, a memorial meeting was held for the young lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, and Novaya Gazeta freelancer who'd been shot.
The Politkovskaya trial had created a schism in Moscow liberal circles. On one side were people who felt they'd seen this show before: two Chechens in the dock; dubious evidence; well-publicised arrests. (...) On the other side was Novaya Gazeta, the loudest opposition paper in Russia, which believed that at the time, at least, the authorities had done their job. (...)
Everyone was at the memorial meeting: the human-rights campaigners who thought the Makhmudov brothers were innocent, and editors of the Novaya Gazeta, who thought they were guilty. It was the coldest day of the year, five degrees Fahrenheit, and at the public square Chistye Prudy speaker after speaker got up to talk about the work that the lawyer had done on behalf of nascent independent unions, opposition journalists (he had defended Polittkovskaya against charges of libel), and anti-Fascist activists. 'The cops aren't shit!' a tall young man in sunglasses from the group Antifa, which engages in fistfights with Nazi groups on the streets, declared. 'They come to our meetings and get them on video' - there was, in fact, a beefy man with a camcorder standing up on a height and scanning the crowd with his camera - 'but when it comes to protecting us they're too afraid!'
(...)
The alleged organiser of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, was an odd character. Dark, short, and solidly built, he'd worked until 2003 in the Moscow police's organised-crime department, in an 'ethnic unit' devoted to the criminal organisations run by ethnic diasporas in the capital. 'This is a hateful figure to me,' Musaev, the lead defence lawyer, admitted. 'This is a person whose job it was to destroy Chechens. I remember people like him used to come and search my house when I was a kid.' In 2003, Khadzhikurbanov was jailed for allegedly beating a drug dealer during a search. (The conviction was overturned in 2006.) Now he was accused of recruiting Politkovskaya's killers and of procuring the gun for Rustam Makhmudov.
(Khadzhikurbanov, declarava-se inocente mas sabia bem quem contrataria para o trabalho. Sergey Ponomarev/AP)
But Khadzhikurbanov was also a true believer. He had served in Chechnya in both the first and the second Chechen wars. He had stormed the Nord-Ost theatre in October, 2002, when it was occupied by Chechen terrorists. He was well spoken and quick to take offence. Unlike his good friend Ryaguzov, from the F.S.B., who spent much of the trial poring over a book of crossword puzzles, Khadzhikurbanov often brought a folder with papers to the sessions and rustled through it as the trial proceeded. Of all the defendants, he was the most eager to engage with journalists during the breaks and plead his case.
Khadzhikurbanov barely bored to deny the accusations that he'd assaulted the travel agent: he was convinced that the man was forging passports for Chechen rebels. But he was incredulous at the Politkovskaya's indictment. He'd never seen Ibragim until they walked into court together; he had met Dzabrail just once, when the boy's jailed uncle asked him to give Dzabrail three hundred dollars for groceries. The police officer who the lone witness against Khadzhikurbanov was a liar who owed him a lot of money, and might himself have been behind the murder. What's more, Khadzhikurbanov had got out of prison only on September 22, 2006.
'What did you do after your release?' his lawyer asked him.
'I organised a killing in fifteen days.'
'No, really, what did you do?'
'I did what anyone who had just been in prison for two years would do, who has a family and kids.'
'You spent time with your family,' the Judge said.
'Yes.'
Musaev interjected. 'It's possible I missed something, maybe my attention wandered, but did the prosecution at any point say anything at all about you buying a gun, where you got the gun, and who you got it from?'
It hadn't actually.
At this point, Musaev, having just recently demonstrated that his client (Dzabrail) was a sweetheart and his client's brother and alleged co-conspirator an idiot, had a follow-up question for Khadzhikurbanov.
'Tell me: If you were planning to carry out surveillance on someone, would you hire for this task a professional, or would you hire the brothers Makhmudov, one of whom was trying to apply to graduate school, and the other of whom lugged fish at the Litkino market?'
'I would hire professionals,' Khadzhikurbanov said.
(Segundo a acusacao, o tio dos 'meninos', Lom-Ali Gaitukayev - um figura bem conhecida do submundo moscovita, na altura, a cumprir pena de prisao pela tentativa de assassínio de um empresário - tinha sido contactado pelo seu ex-colega no F.S.B., Pavel Ryaguzov, para encontar agentes para o trabalho. Foi ele que depois contratou Khadzhikurbanov, que havia conhecido na prisao, e os seus sobrinhos, Dzabrail e Ibragim para assassinarem Anna Politkovskaya. Gaitukayev apareceu no tribunal apenas como testemunha. Mikhail Pochuev/Kommersant)
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