O julgamento do caso Politkovskaya - VII

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:

(Os outros réus: o antigo agente do F.S.B., Pavel Ryaguzov (E), e o ex-polícia, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov (D). Novaya Gazeta.)

One of the biggest problems with the case was that, for a contract killing, it didn't seem to have left a money trail. When, during closed-session testimony, Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, the Makhmudovs' mobster uncle, had been given a market estimate of two million dollars for such an assassination, he joked, 'That money doesn't seem to have reached my nephews.' Earlier, in one of the more contentious moments in the trial, Moskalenko had tried to figure out what Dzhabrail Makhmudov lived on. He was evasive, but it was evident that he was living cheaply, staying on people's couches, taking money from his older brothers. Moskalenko wanted to know how he managed to talk so much on the phone. 'That's expensive,' she said.

'No, it is no,' Dzhabrail said. 'I had a tarif fixe. It cost three hundred rubles' - about eleven dollars - 'a month. And it still costs three hundred rubles a month! Forever. If I ever get out of here, that's how much it'll cost!' The prosecution also tried to find the money. Quite dramatically, it told the court that Pavel Ryaguzov had bought an eighty-thousand-dollar Land Rover in the fall of 2006. Ryaguzov shook his head and said he'd had to take a loan to buy the car.
'For how long?' Judge Zubov grew interested.
'Three years.'
'Could you have managed that?'
'Well, I traded in my BMW, so it wasn't as much.'
'Oh,' the Judge said.

Everyone in the court acted as if the prosecution had failed once again. 'That's nothing,' the veteran reporter said as we filed out for lunch. 'Show me those boys' - Ibragim and Dzhabrail - 'in a Land Rover, then it'll mean something.' The open secret of the trial as it touched on the F.S.B. and the police was that they were already incredibly corrupt. 'Friends,' Musaev said in his closing statement, 'has any of you ever visited Lubyanka Square in Moscow? Have you looked at the cars parked there? It goes Mercedes, Audi, BMW. Mercedes, Audi, BMW. Ryaguzov's Land Rover was probably the cheapest in the whole lot.' One evening, as I was wandering around the Arbat after a very long session, I happened to spot Judge Zubov eating dinner with a number of court employees in the Bosfor, a popular, mid-priced Turkish restaurant. And I thought of one of Khadzhikurbanov's outbursts when the prosecutor mentioned a dinner he'd had with Ryaguziv and a prominent Chechen businessman in the upscale Napoleon Restaurant, in late September of 2006. 'So what?' Khadzhikurbanov cried out. 'I ate dinner at nice restaurants all the time!'

He was a former police officer with a wife and three young kids who had just got out of jail - and yet you believed that, even without participating in a high-priced contract killing, he had enough going on that he could eat out all he wanted. It was a world through which money circulated, and a world which, as it turned out, the Judge and the prosecutors didn't have access. They sounded like people who, when faced with the ways of the rich, immediately suspect a sinister plot. Of course, they were right: there is a plot. It just wasn't necessarily a plot to kill Politkovskaya. And so, in the court, the F.S.B. officer and the former police detective laughed at them.

(O Juíz Zubov parecia frequentemente aborrecido pelo julgamento e foi apelidado pelos jornalistas russos como 'Winnie the Pooh'. AFP/Getty)

On February 3rd, an elderly journalist in a suburb north of Moscow was apparently outside his house. Two days later, the editor-in-chief of the independent radio station Ekho Moskvy came home to find a log with an axe sticking out of it lying outside his door.

At the Politkovskaya trial, once it became clear that the defendants were not guilty of the crimes of which they had been accused, the question became how a case so important could possibly have come to court with an indictment so obviously weak. Even the defendants had theories on this score. 'They've got what they wanted,' Ryaguzov said during one break. 'They got to announce on television that they'd arrested an F.S.B. agent. It doesn't matter what happens next. They've already said it, they've already won.'

Musaev hypothesized that the government hadn't been counted on Musaev. 'These boys come from a poor family,' he said. 'They didn't have money to live on, much less for a lawyer.' (Musaev was working for free.) He asked if I'd seen Ibragim's court-appointed lawyer, 'the little one, with glasses.' He said, 'They'd have got lawyers like that, who sit quietly the whole trial. I'm not trying to brag, but a fact is a fact. Now at least there's some hope.'

There was a further reason for the weakness of the case. On the day of the murder, the cameras at the Ramstore supermarket had captured two people, a man and a woman, who were clearly following Politkovskaya. This would explain how the shooter knew so precisely when Politkovskaya would get home. (It wasn't because Ibragim was standing on some street corner.) What's more, unlike the video of the shooter in front of Politkovskaya's building, the Ramstore video shows the suspect faces. According to Sergei Sokolov, of Novaya Gazeta, the investigation followed the trail of these people very aggressively at first, and then suddenly stopped. The suggestion was that the people in that video were untouchable.

FIM