By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 5, 2007

MOSCOW, Sept. 4 -- A week after Russia's chief prosecutor announced the arrest of 10 suspects in the contract-style killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the investigation into her murder appears to be in disarray.

Pyotr Gabriyan, the chief investigator in the case, was replaced by a more senior official Tuesday, a move that Politkovskaya's former editors at the Novaya Gazeta newspaper said in a statement caused them "disappointment and bewilderment."

The prosecutor's office insisted in a statement that the investigative team was merely being "reinforced" and said that Gabriyan, who had earned the respect of Politkovskaya's colleagues and family, would remain on the case.

The decision to in effect demote Gabriyan followed the release of two suspects on grounds of lack of evidence. A third suspect, an officer in Russia's domestic security service, was also ordered released by the courts but was rearrested on unrelated charges, according to his attorney. And a fourth man, a former police major, claims a firm alibi: He was in prison at the time of the killing, the newspaper Kommersant reported.

For reasons that are unclear, Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika apparently made his announcement of the arrests before investigators were ready to charge any of the suspects, whose names were quickly leaked to the news media. Politkovskaya's colleagues argue that the premature announcement and identification of those in custody damaged the real goal of the investigation: exposing and arresting whoever ordered the killing.

"The siloviki are achieving what they set out to achieve," Novaya Gazeta's editor in chief, Dmitry Muratov, said on the Echo Moskvy radio station. "They wanted to ruin the case, and now they will remove Gabriyan and finish that process."

"Siloviki" is a Russian word used to describe former military and security service personnel in the highest levels of government, including some officials in President Vladimir Putin's immediate circle.

Politkovskaya, a hard-hitting journalist who excoriated Putin for the brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the Russian republic of Chechnya, was shot at close range in the lobby of her central Moscow apartment building on Oct. 7. She was 48.

The killing generated international outrage and highlighted the perils faced by reporters in Russia. At least 13 journalists, including Paul Klebnikov, a U.S. citizen and editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, have been killed since Putin came to power in 2000.

On the day Politkovskaya was buried, Putin dismissed her work as "extremely insignificant." He said her killing bore the hallmarks of a provocation orchestrated abroad and designed to undermine Russia's reputation. He offered no specific evidence for that claim, which was echoed by Chaika last week when he announced the arrests.

"Our investigation has led us to conclude that only people living outside the Russian Federation could be interested in eliminating Politkovskaya," Chaika said. The killing, he said, was an attempt to "destabilize the country, change its constitutional order, stoke crisis, return to the old system where money and oligarchs decided everything, discredit the national leadership and provoke external pressure on our country."

Journalists at Novaya Gazeta said that without proof to the contrary it remained just as likely that the hit was commissioned inside Russia.

Chaika told reporters that Politkovskaya's killing was organized by an ethnic Chechen crime boss. Three former police officers, a former police major and a member of the FSB, a successor agency to the KGB, were also among those arrested.

But a court this week ordered the release of FSB Lt. Col. Pavel Ryagusov. His lawyer told the Russian news agency Interfax that his client was rearrested on charges of abduction, extortion, trespassing and abuse of power, none of which were related to Politkovskaya's death. Last Tuesday, a police officer and bodyguard implicated in the killing were released.