MOSCOW — A lead investigator in the murder of Natalya Estemirova, a human rights worker who was abducted and shot to death in Chechnya last July, said on Thursday that the authorities know who shot her but that they have been unable to arrest the suspect.
Igor Sobol, head of investigations at the investigative committee for the Southern Federal District prosecutor’s office, confirmed an account given anonymously to the Interfax news service on Thursday. He said the gun used to kill Ms. Estemirova had been found in a weapons cache, and that there are "objective grounds to identify a group of people” behind her killing.
He said the authorities could not arrest the suspect because he was in hiding, and said he could give no more information out of fear of harming the investigation. An employee at the prosecutor general’s office in Moscow said there would be no comment on the matter.
The murder of Ms. Estemirova, one of the most respected human rights workers in the North Caucasus, drew international condemnation. Seven months have passed with no arrest, and foreign leaders have repeatedly pressed Moscow to find her killers.
Ms. Estemirova, 50, was leaving for work when several men pushed her into a white car. Her body was found about 50 miles away, by the side of a highway in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, with gunshot wounds to the head and chest.
Though several neighbors saw Ms. Estemirova’s abduction, and the car passed a checkpoint on the Ingush border, witnesses have been afraid to come forward. Tanya Lokshina, who does research in the Caucasus for Human Rights Watch, said on Thursday that some of Ms. Estemirova’s colleagues have long sensed that investigators know who shot her, but are adamant about identifying the person who ordered the killing.
"There are good grounds to believe that people in high official positions could be involved,” Ms. Lokshina said. "No matter how high-level the client is, he has to be held accountable, otherwise it’s not going to mean anything.”
Other colleagues of Ms. Estemirova expressed skepticism that the investigation had made progress.
Oleg Orlov, the head of Memorial, the human rights group that Ms. Estemirova worked for, told Interfax on Thursday that, according to his own contacts with investigators, the identity of the killer had not been established.
All along, piecemeal information has emerged from the investigation. In October, Aleksandr Bastrykhin, head of the general prosecutor’s investigative committee, said the case was "on the edge of being solved.”
But earlier this week, an official at the regional investigative committee was quoted as saying that "heaps of evidence were destroyed” during the search of the crime scene. Andrei Mironov, who works in the Moscow office of Memorial, said he has become wary of all the reports.
"If they have something to say, why not present themselves, why not say, ‘We have such and such proof and these are the suspects,’” Mr. Mironov said. "I think they simply want to pretend they are doing an investigation. There is so much international pressure.”
Ms. Estemirova had spent decades documenting kidnappings and killings that she linked to the Chechen president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, who was appointed by the Kremlin and has used brutal methods to bring separatists under control.
Leaders of Memorial immediately laid blame for her murder at Mr.
Kadyrov’s feet. He responded by suing for libel, though this month he
withdrew several of those suits.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/world/europe/26chechnya.html
