Anna Politkovskaya in Helsinki in December 2002.
Rustom Makhmudov was detained on 31 May 2011 in Chechnya and charged two days later for the murder of journalist and human rights defender Anna Politkovskaya. This news comes almost 5 years after she was brutally shot at point-blank range while entering the elevator of her apartment building in the centre of Moscow where she lived in October 2006.
Anna was known for her fearless coverage of the conflict and human rights situation in Chechnya, and had thus been detained, threatened and even poisoned previously on a number of occasions. She was a journalist for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and had written extensively on abuses such as violence in the army, corruption in state structures, and police brutality.