Crowds Bid Farewell to Russian Reporter

No Senior Officials Attend Service for Slain Critic of Putin's Chechnya Policies

MOSCOW, Oct. 10 -- In the House of Farewell, an austere, cavernous funeral hall at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery, the body of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya lay in an open casket Tuesday afternoon as thousands of mourners -- ambassadors, journalists, civil activists, politicians and ordinary Russians -- filed past and paid their final respects.

No senior Kremlin official attended -- an absence that people here noted, along with the almost complete silence of President Vladimir Putin in the immediate wake of the apparent contract killing of Politkovskaya in the lobby of her apartment Saturday.

"It's really strange to see none of our senior officials here," Eduard Sagalayev, chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Corporation, told the assembled mourners.

The Kremlin said it was represented by Deputy Culture and Press Minister Leonid Nadirov.

Shortly after Politkovskaya was put in the ground, Putin, on an official visit to Germany, condemned the killing, but not without a parting swipe at a woman who was one of his fiercest critics.

"We must be clear that it was a dreadful and unacceptable crime which cannot be allowed to go unpunished," Putin told reporters after meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Dresden, the city where Putin served as a KGB officer in the 1980s.

"Her influence on political life in the country was extremely insignificant in scale," he said. "She was known in journalist and human rights circles, but her influence on political life in Russia was minimal. This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her articles."

Putin's only other publicly reported comment on the killing came in a telephone conversation with President Bush when he promised an "objective investigation."

Politkovskaya was renowned internationally for fearless reporting on the brutality of Russia's prosecution of two wars in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. "This is a tragedy for Russia," Yasen Zasursky, dean of Moscow State University's journalism faculty, told mourners. "They executed our conscience."

Prosecutors and colleagues have said she was almost certainly killed because of her work. Thirteen journalists have been killed since Putin came to power, and there have been no convictions in any of the cases.

Russian newspapers have reported that police are studying videotapes from a supermarket where Politkovskaya was shopping and was followed by a man and woman just before the killing.

Politkovskaya, 48, had just carried groceries up to her apartment and was coming back down for more bags inside her modest Lada car when her killer shot her four times. Bullets struck her in the chest and shoulder and then in the head.