O julgamento do caso Politkovskaya - VI

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:

(Outra fotografia do assassino de Anna Politkovskaya.)

Almost all the Russian journalists who regularly attended the trial believed that the defendants were innocent and had been framed. 'You don't understand how things are done here,' a young court reporter named Anatoly Karavaev, from Vremya Novostei, told me. 'They just do a dragnet for Chechens and see what comes up. But these guys are innocent. Dzhabrail is an educated person.'
'Why can't he remember what they were doing on October 7th? I asked.
'Who can remember what they were doing on October 7th? I can't remember what I was doing two days ago. And you heard him: they just start beating you and beating you and telling you to remember. I wouldn't be able to remember anything.'

We were walking to the metro after a day in court as Karavaev laid this out for me. 'When this started, I thought they were guilty,' he told me. 'They're Chechens. You know how Russians feel about Chechens. They're all criminals, they are all guilty. But now...I don't think so. Because I know how the police do things. They were told to find someone, so they found someone.' 'They have nothing,' Karavaev continued the next day, during yet another break. He'd spent the night online reading Russian Wikipedia. 'The whole thing's a frameup, it's made to order, the F.S.B. has made things clear to the Judge. What more is there to say?'

Suddenly, we were interrupted from the other end of the journalists' bench by the oldest reporter at the trial, a dry, somewhat withdrawn character from one of the city's most respected dailies. He now demanded of Karavaev how long he'd been covering the courts.
'Not long,' Karavaev admitted.
'And I've been covering them for fifteen years. In that time, I've seen five framups. Five. You can tell when you see it. Spend some years in the courts and then we can talk.'
We were interrupted at this point by Musaev, who had, he said, seen more than five frameups already, and he hadn't been working as a lawyer for very long at all.

(Ramzan Kadyrov, o homem de mao de Putin na Chechnya, nao poderia ter mais parecencas com um vilao da série James Bond. Aqui fica um ensaio fotográfico do déspota na Residência Presidencial que conta com um zoo pessoal. AP.)

That day, the veteran reporter took Karavaev and me to lunch at McDonald's. 'Might the F.S.B. have killed her using Chechen hands?' he wondered, over a tray laden with four cheeseburgers. 'Maybe. I think that's what happened. But it's not like Putin told someone, 'Go kill Politkovskaya.' And then signed a Presidential order about it. No. But maybe they were sitting around at the F.S.B. one day and some major general said, 'Jesus fucking Christ, this Politkovskaya, isn't there anything we can do about her?' And one of the lieutenant colonels said, 'General, I think we can.' And that was it, that was the whole conversation. Or maybe Ramzan' - Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-based ruler of Chechnya, against whom Politkovskaya had written her most vicious pieces - 'was sitting around and he said, 'This bitch. Are you telling me we can't do anything about this?' And then they got in touch with their friends in the F.S.B. and those guys said, 'Oh, you have a problem? Because, yeah, we have a problem, too. Let's work together on this.'

'The thing about Anna Stepanovna,' he went on, 'was that she'd started going after all of them personally. That's the funny thing about Russia. And about Chechnya in particular. It's not reporting on someone's business that gets you, it's going after them personally. It's one thing to say, 'Look at all this money that got stolen.' That wasn't enough for her. She said Ramzan was a 'coward hiding behind his bodyguards.' I mean, she said this of a Chechen. Can you imagine that? A woman saying that of a Chechen?' He shook his head. 'She kept pushing the envelope. She kept going after them personally. You felt like this was her destiny that's where she was heading and she knew it. And then it happened.'

(...)
Prosecutors in Russia don't have trouble getting convictions: bench trials have a ninety-nine-per-cent conviction rate; even jury trials, which are rare (and usually reserved for the most egregious crimes), have a seventy-five-per-cent conviction rate. Musaev confessed to me that he had zero wins and ten losses in criminal trials with a presiding judge, and this was his first jury trial. When I put all this Ilya Politkovsky, he assured me that the prosecution was going to come with a lot of heat in the portion of the trial where the sides presented 'additional' evidence. Instead, the lead prosecutor stood up and said, 'We're in a bit of an awkward situation. You see, the evidence that we were going to present today has been lost. And we can't proceed without it.' Turmoil ensued. It was soon revealed that the 'evidence' in question was just a compact disk with a PowerPoint presentation that showed the movements of Politkovskaya and the getaway car on the day of the murder. It was a file that all the lawyers and even Ilya Politkovskaya also had on their computers.

(Um representante do tribunal faz um comunicado de imprensa. Alexey Sazonov/AFP/Getty Images)

The jurors were release for the day. The wire-service reporters rushed into the hallway to file reports that a key piece of evidence had been lost; for the first time in weeks, Politkovskaya led the news cycle. It was too early for lunch, and so I stayed in the courtroom. Ilya let me study the controversial PowerPoint file on his laptop. It listed all the cameras near Politkovskaya's building that were used to capture shots of the green Lada and of the shooter practicing his entrance and exit in the days before the killing. It had a map of Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov's whereabouts, as per cell-tower locations. It showed photographs of the shooter entering the building, and Politkovskaya approaching the building and rummaging for her keys, and then it showed the gruesome photos of her crumpled on the floor of the elevator, blood from the gunshot in her gray hair. A time stamp accompanied all the photos: 15:57:38; 16:06:28; 16:07:03.

When I finished I saw that a small group - including Ilya and Moskalenko - had gathered around Musaev, who was sitting in front of his laptop. I came over just as he pressed a button and a video began to play. It was from July 200. There was a river, it was a sunny day, and some young men in swim trunks were covered in mud. They were throwing the mud at one another and laughing, chasing after each other with the mud. I recognised Tamerlan, the youngest Makhmudov brother; he kept whipping mud at a sturdy, full-belied man. It was Rustam, nine months after the shooting. Dzhabrail was holding the camera - it was his cell phone, which was already part of the evidence for the case. Everyone watched it in silence, amazed. 'Turn on the sound,' Moskalenko said.
'They're just playing,' Ibragim's lawyer said. 'You think they're going to say, 'Remember how we killed Politkovskaya?''
'Musaev turned on the sound. 'I'm holding the fort!'' someone translated from Chechen. ''I'm coming at him form the side. I've scored a direct hit!''
'They're playing at war,' Ibragim's lawyer said.
'I get it,' Moskalenko said.

Musaev turned off the sound. It was a months before the younger brothers were all arrested. There was no way that the bearlike man in the video was the same as the thin man in the baseball cap who had entered and exited Politkovskaya's building just before and after she was killed.

FIM