Daily Archives: August 30, 2007

With all the hoopla around the Anna Politkovskaya murder case, we’ve forgotten to check in with good ol’Andrei Lugovoi to see how he’s doing. Whether valid or not the Politikovskaya murder is often linked with the Litvinenko murder with the following terms–dissident, “fierce Kremlin critic,” Berezovsky, Chechnya, KGB/FSB, and, of course, Putin.

Unlike the Politkovskaya case, however, the Litvinenko case remains stuck in a bureaucratic-diplomatic-legal quagmire. The Russian government has repeated refused allowing Lugovoi to be extradited to Britain. And so far the Russian authorities have been unsatisfied with what the British have provided by way of proof of Lugovoi’s involvement. “We have not received any evidence from London of Lugovoi’s guilt, and those documents we have are full of blank spaces and contradictions,” Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the committee investigating the Litvinenko affair at the Russian Prosecutors Office, told Rossiiskaya gazeta. The UK ..read more

Scratch two off the list of suspects in the Anna Politkovskaya’s murder.  Yesterday, authorities released Alexei Berkin from police custody for lack of evidence.  Prosecutors initially believed that Berkin was in league with the Chechen based Lasagna criminal gang (no really that’s what the article says ‘lasagna”  Man, these guys really need to lay off the Italian mob flicks).  Berkin couldn’t be reached for comment.  His wife told Kommersant that he was out walking the baby.  But she told reporters this, “We don’t want to relive this nightmare.  He won’t tell you anything because he made a non-disclosure agreement [with the police].”  Calls to Berkin’s mobile also went unanswered.  Apparently, it is still in police custody.

Prosecutors also discovered that the alibi for another one of its suspects, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, was true.  At the time of Politkovskaya’s murder, Khadzhikurbanov was in jail.

Way to go boys. Way to go.

Alexander Zaitchik and Mark Ames tackle the rise of skinhead violence in Russia in the latest issue of the Nation. As they point out, what was a trademark of Islamists–i.e. the beheading video–has now been adopted by Russian skins. In addition to the video, they note other signs of an escalation in skinhead violence. Namely the attack on anti-nuclear activists in Angarsk which left one antifa activist dead.

For sure there are numerous other examples of far right violence one could mention. And it seems that the Russian state is beginning to have enough. Earlier this month, a St. Petersburg court sentenced seven teens for killing an antiracist activist. The anti-extremism law seems to be applied more and more to the far right. This is despite the fact that today Russian authorities confiscated the computers from the Tolerance Support Foundation in Nizhny Novgorod under the ..read more