Date

15/07/2009  

First

Natalya  

Surname

ESTEMIROVA  

Sex/Age

F, 50  

Incident

homicide  

Motive

J  

Place

roadside  

Job

journalist  

Medium

print  

Federal District Plus

North Caucasus  

Street, Town, Region

Gazi-Yurt, Ingushetia  

Freelance

yes  

Local/National

national, "Novaya gazeta"  

Other Ties

rights activist, Memorial board member  

Cause of Death

shot  

Legal Qualification

105 (murder)  

Impunity

investigation  

[Update, November 2011]

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, 9 November 2011

Natalia Estemirova, a history teacher by training, worked since 2000 for the Memorial Human Rights Centre in the North Caucasus. She gathered eye witness accounts of some of the worst crimes against humanity committed in the second Chechen conflict, and in its aftermath she courageously continued to collect information on grave human rights violations, such as extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, torture and ill-treatment in detention committed by local law enforcement agencies, as well as working on implementation of social and economic rights in the post-conflict Chechnya.

In an increasingly restrictive environment in Chechnya, where freedom of the media and the work of human rights NGOs were under serious threat, Natalia Estemirova was one of the very few people who dared to publish information about human rights violations in which government officials might have been involved. Natalia Estemirova told Amnesty International about threats by President Ramzan Kadyrov against her, her daughter, and also against journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who she was helping on her trips to Chechnya to get in contact with victims of human rights violations. Following one such threat in March 2008, Natalia Estemirova had to leave the country for several weeks.

In July 2009, she spoke to the media about the enforced disappearance of a young man from a hospital, where he had been under police guard, as well as about a case of alleged extrajudicial execution. She was reportedly told by the ombudsman of human rights of the Chechen Republic that her comments to the media had upset the authorities in Chechnya and that she had put herself at a risk by doing so.

In the morning of 15 July 2009, on her way to work, Natalia Estemirova was abducted by armed men outside the apartment building she lived in Grozny. Her body was found a few hours later in the neighbouring Republic of Ingushetia. She had been shot at point blank range.

The investigation initially looked into different leads concerning the reasons for her murder. However, the possible involvement of authorities in her killing was brushed aside. In 2010, it transpired that the investigation was focusing on a version of events which many of Natalia Estemirova's colleagues find questionable: that she had been murdered by a member of an armed group.

In July 2011 Memorial, the Federation Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l'Homme (FIDH) and Novaya Gazeta published a report of their own findings which questioned the version of the official investigation. The Russian Investigation Committee was initially dismissive of the report, claiming that its authors lacked the necessary expertise and did not have access to all the information in the case. However, following widespread coverage of the findings published by Natalia's colleagues, the Chairman of the Investigation Committee told the media that all possible leads would be investigated. Nevertheless, there are still no reliable signs that all those involved in the murder, including those who might have ordered it, will be brought to justice.

http://www.rightsinrussia.info/noticeboard/aiuk91111


RIGHTS ACTIVISTS EXPRESS DOUBTS ABOUT INVESTIGATION (November 2010)

The murderer of Natalya Estemirova is in hiding abroad, say Interfax sources in Russia’s law-enforcement agencies. Spokesmen for the power ministries in Chechnya and Ingushetia have stated that the man who carried out this crime, according to their information, is not in either republic.

Human rights activists are not inclined to believe this information. “I have grave doubts about this,” said Svetlana Gannushkina, head of the Civic Assistance committee. “I see no grounds for such conclusions.” Gannushkina, who was personally acquainted with Estemirova, added: “The investigators are at work but they have excluded one of the important areas for investigation - that linked to Natalya’s professional activities” [as a rights activist and journalist]. In her view, the main interpretation of the murder is not being examined at all: this links Estemirova’s murder to her part in revealing details of the public execution of Rizvan Albekov in the Chechen village of Akhkinchu-Barzoi [see below].

Earlier Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigations Committee, declared that the killer had been identified and was somewhere in Russia. He did not name the individual but the press, using its own sources, said that the main suspects in the case are the Chechen brothers and opposition fighters, Rizvan, Anzor and Alkhazur Bashayev. The main interpretation of the official investigators is that Estemirova was murdered as an act of personal vengeance after she published information linking the brothers to the Chechen opposition. They were tracked down through investigation of the band led by field commander Islam Uspakhadjiev.

Earlier it was suggested that two of the Bashayev brothers had been killed in an operation by the security forces. Only Rizvan survived because he was detained earlier. Now it is believed they are all still alive. Oleg Orlov, head of the Memorial human rights centre, is apprehensive that the investigators have recently been in a rush to blame the murder of Estemirova on a Chechen fighter, preferably one who is dead. Human rights activists in Russia do not believe that the investigators will find the killers of the Memorial activist.

Source: Newsru.com, 27 October 2010


SEPTEMBER 2010

The Investigative Committee, which now answers directly to the President (until recently it was formally subordinate to the Prosecutor General), has given assurances to a visiting delegation from the CPJ that it will give serious consideration to 19 deaths that the CPJ and many other monitors believe to have been murders linked to the professional activities of the deceased journalist. One name on this list is that of Natalya Estemirova.

(See agency and Russian media reports on CPJ press conference)


CHECHNYA’S HUMAN RIGHTS OMBUDSMAN REPRIMANDS ESTEMIROVA

On 6 July 2009 policemen from Kurchaloi abducted Rizvan Albekov and his son Aziz, who had just graduated from secondary school. That evening Albekov was publicly executed, supposedly for providing food to the Chechen opposition fighters. A former Soviet army soldier during the war in Afghanistan (1979-1989), Albekov lived in the Stavropol Region for 26 years before returning to Chechnya in 2008.

Nothing was known of the fate of Aziz. Only the Grozny branch of Memorial made efforts to find him. ... As information began to leak out about the execution of Albekov the Chechen authorities were swift to react. Memorial staff were summoned by Nurdi Nukhazhiev, the republic’s ombudsman for human rights, who was shown on local television expressing his “surprise at the lunatic efforts of certain people to only find negative stories about the Chechen Republic and then spread them throughout the world.”

Source: Novaya gazeta, http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/081/17.html


FIRST REPORT (July 2009)

A human rights activist and journalist, winner of the Anna Politkovskaya Award and the Swedish Parliament Award "The Right to Exist", Natalia Estemirova walked on a razor's edge for a long time, investigating crimes involving torture, executions and disappearances of people in Chechnya. On 15 July 2009 this courageous woman finally became a victim herself.

The GDF digest, 23 July, continued:

… "Thousands of Butchers At Large", "Kidnappings Continue in Chechnya", "A Fusillade Autumn", "Chechnya: Generations at War" - those are the headings of some of Natalia's stories in Novaya Gazeta for which she worked as a freelance reporter for a long time. "We were compelled to formally terminate our cooperation because the status of a Novaya Gazeta reporter had become a threat to Natalia; we published her last few articles under an assumed name," NG deputy editor-in-chief Sergey Sokolov told the Ekho Moskvy radio station.

It was Estemirova who independently investigated the recent kidnapping of father and son Albekov which ended in Rizvan Albekov's public execution and in the fate of his son Aziz still unknown. Natalia promised to report details of that and other crimes to the Caucasian Knot news agency on 14 July 2009.

She is also known to have been one of the few people in Chechnya who took the liberty of not only disagreeing with the republic's president Ramzan Kadyrov but also of arguing with him.

Early on 15 July Estemirova was kidnapped in downtown Grozny: unidentified men, ignoring the presence of eyewitnesses, seized the woman, pushed her into a car and drove away. Hours later her body was found in neighboring Ingushetia with bullet wounds in the chest and head.

The killing was met with universal condemnation. Estemirova's colleagues maintain that the crime was organized by Chechen force agencies controlled by President Kadyrov. The republic's leader, for his part, has made public a statement saying that the human rights activist's killers "do not deserve to be called human beings; they cannot hope for mercy and must be punished as the most ruthless criminals". RF President Dmitry Medvedev has expressed his indignation and instructed Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigations Committee at the Prosecutor General's Office, to take every possible measure to solve the crime. He also expressed condolences to the victim's family and friends. International human rights organizations, among them the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House and Amnesty International, have urged the Russian authorities to thoroughly investigate Estemirova's assassination and take steps to end the killing of journalists in Russia.

Criminal proceedings have been instituted under two articles of the Criminal Code: Articles 105 ("Homicide") and 222 ("Illegal possession and sale of arms and ammunition"). According to Russia's Deputy Interior Minister Arkady Yedelev, several lines of inquiry are being followed: "One, murder linked with the victim's professional, or, to be more precise, public activities. Two, a provocation by armed gang leaders aimed at discrediting the Chechen government and law enforcement bodies. Three, violent robbery. And four, domestic crime."

Domestic crime…

The thugs who kidnapped Natalia, tied her up, drove her through all the road blocks and killed her with two shots to the heart and one to the head, showed their criminal professionalism. Yet our law enforcement officers again start talking about "domestic crime". They seem to be short on versions. Or are they simply unwilling to do their job properly?

…The investigation has been taken under special control by many - the RF Prosecutor General's Office, Deputy Interior Minister Yedelev, and even President Kadyrov, who promised that the search for the perpetrators would not be limited to an official investigation but will "also be conducted unofficially, in line with the Chechen tradition". Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee, has already arrived in Chechnya to coordinate the investigation process.

Meanwhile, Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev comments that "it is a very difficult crime to solve because it was committed on the territory of two different republics". He pledged that every effort would be taken to track down the killers. We have heard scores of statements to that effect before but can hardly recall a single crime of this kind ever being truly solved.