Continuamos hoje com a serializacao do artigo de Keith Gessen sobre o julgamento do assassínio de Anna Politkovskaya, publicado na edicao de 23 Marco da revista New Yorker:
(O irmão Rustam, principal suspeito pelo assassínio de Politkovskaya, que nunca chegou a ser preso e julgado em tribunal. AP)
Politkovskaya's route home: in order to demonstrate that Ibragim had waited as a lookout for Politkovskaya's car, the prosecution produced a map on which they charted her route home from the supermarket. Musaev, dissatisfied with the details and especially with what he considered the skewed scale of the map - 'this Picasso painting,' he called it - demonstrated that Politkovskaya could have taken a different route home and bypassed Ibragim.
There was more. The Ramstore supermarket where Politkovskaya shopped on October 7th also had video cameras, can they seemed to have the wrong date. The time on the camera in Politkovskaya's entryway was not synchronized with the time on the bank cameras, nor was it synchronised with the cameras in the other entryways. There were explanations for all these
discrepancies, but their cumulative effect was powerful, and it set up the most significant of the questions that Musaev had for the prosecution, dealing with the veracity of the cell-phone records.
The cell-phone records were a mess. They had initially been submitted to the court not as a printout but as an Excel file that any user could alter. Throughout the trial, all such documents were displayed on a large flat-screen monitor that would be mounted on the desk just before the jurors, and at one point Musaev connected his laptop to the screen, opened a copy of the Excel file on his computer, deleted 'Dzhabrail Makhmudov,' and typed in the name of the lead investigator of the case, 'Petros Garibyan'. He further showed that the author of the file wasn't the cell-phone company, MegaPhone, but the 'Interior Ministry'; i.e. the police. In the column that should have said 'User' or 'Customer'. it said, instead, 'Principal.' This too, could be explained - the investigators had, for their own convenience, transferred the cell-phone records to an Excel file. But they had made a humiliating mistake: Dzhabrail's records showed six calls between him and Ibragim, while Ibragim's showed only four. Musaev immediately declared the cell-phone records fake.
The phone records became one of the two great evidenciary scandals of the trial. Moskalenko asked the court to request new records from the cell-phone company, and when they came back they did so as a printout, not as an Excel file, and the phone calls corresponded. But Musaev at this point was indomitable. 'They fixed their mistakes,' he said. 'Good for them.' By the end of the trial, he was convinced that all the evidence had been cooked up. When I told him I found it easier to believe in technical or human error than in a conspiracy at the investigators' office, he joked with a lawyer's joke: 'A man on trial is asked, 'What can you say in your defence?' 'Your Honour, I was peeling an orange on the street. This gentleman was walking by, accidentally slipped on the rind, and fell on my peeling knife.' So the judge says, 'And this happened twenty-eight times?''
(...)
But the tactical effect of the phone-records argument was to shift the moral burden of the case: Musaev was no longer opposed to the Politkovskaya's family, he was opposed to the falsifications of the authorities. And, like it or not, the Politkovskaya family, in accepting the validity of the phone calls, found itself on the falsifiers' side.
(As fotografias das câmaras de segurança do prédio, tiradas antes e depois do assassínio de Politkovskaya. Xinhua/Reuters)
Then, there was the problem of Rustam. The indictment, which runs to two hundred pages, devotes a great deal of space to him. We are told that the killer wore sneakers with a white midsole; witnesses report that Rustam also wore sneakers like that. Further witnesses describe his appearance, and for several pages the evidence of Rustam's height is the lone detail set off in bold: 'approximately 165-167 cm tall'; 'approximately 167 cm tall' ; 'approximately 168 cm tall' ; 'approximately 165 cm tall.' At the end of all this comes the following paragraph:
"According to the conclusions of the forensic photography expert, the men entering A.S. Politkovskaya's building before her arrival and leaving the building immediately after her shooting is 167 centimetres tall."
During the proceedings, the eldest Makhmudov brother inhabited a gray area: he wasn't in trial, but his brothers were on trial for abetting him, and so the claim that he was the shooter was a key part of the case. Yet the defence managed to cast doubt on the assertion that this was Rustam. For one thing, he had been in a bad car accident in 2004, had broken his hip, and now had a limp. For another, the killer in the baseball cap was thin, whereas Rustam was heavyset. The boys' mother had brought some old photos of him, but these were not admitted as evidence - the Judge argued that Rustam's identity fell outside the bounds of the case. Nevertheless, Dzhabrail, during his testimony, had been asked if the security-camera photo of the killer looked like Rustam. 'I'm telling you, when they showed me that photo and told me it was Rustam, I couldn't believe it,' he said to the court, 'I said, 'This?' This is what you have? I've been counting on some decency! I thought you had something!' Because the thing about Rustam is, he has a body type, how should I put this?' He looked around the room to try to find someone overweight. Some of the jurors were overweight, and Judge Zubov was overweight, but Dzhabrail had enough presence of mind not to remark on it. Finally, he said, 'The thing is, he just really struggled with his weight!'
The certainty that it was Rustam on the video was slowly crumbling. A lot of people are a hundred and sixty-seven centimetres tall.
FIM
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