10 arrests in killing of Russian journalist

MOSCOW — A crime ring aided by rogue police murdered famed journalist Anna Politkovskaya last year on behalf of outsiders bent on discrediting the Kremlin, Russian authorities said Monday, though the reporter's editors dismissed the government's assertion about motive.

Ten men have been arrested in Politkovskaya's murder, Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika said, including a Chechen crime boss and Russian police and security officers who helped track the journalist's movements before her murder in the lobby of her Moscow apartment building last fall.

Politkovskaya, 48, was regarded as Russia's most fearless investigative journalist and one of the Kremlin's fiercest critics. Not long after the reporter's slaying, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that people outside Russia may have engineered her murder to tar the Kremlin's image. Though Putin didn't name names, he appeared to be pointing to Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch and staunch Kremlin critic now living in London.

"Politkovskaya's murder may only have been in the interest of persons outside the Russian Federation," Chaika said Monday, "that have as a goal to ... engineer a crisis in Russia, return to the former system where money and the oligarchs made all the decisions, and discredit the leaders of the Russian state."

But Sergei Sokolov, deputy chief editor of Novaya Gazeta, where Politkovskaya worked, said the paper found no evidence to support such a motive.

Sokolov said editors at the paper believe Politkovskaya's murder is likely linked to her articles about the conflict in Chechnya.

Politkovskaya wrote extensively about atrocities committed by Russian soldiers and pro-Moscow Chechen forces fighting separatists in the southern province of Chechnya. She received threats from all sides of the conflict.

He said the group was led by a Chechen who headed a Moscow crime ring responsible for a series of contract killings in Russia, Ukraine and Latvia. A police major, three former police officers and an officer with the KGB's successor agency, the Federal Security Service, took part by giving Politkovskaya's killers information on her.

Members of the gang responsible for Politkovskaya's murder include suspects in the 2004 murder of Paul Klebnikov, an American citizen and editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, Chaika said.