Anna Politkovskaya Murdered

Investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, known for her reporting on human rights abuses during the Chechen wars and her sharp criticism of Putin, was shot dead in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building on 7 October 2006 — Putin's birthday. Five men, including a former police officer who carried out the shooting and his relatives who organised it, were eventually convicted in 2014, but Russian courts never identified who ordered and paid for the killing, and press freedom organisations have long noted her murder was one of dozens of unsolved or only partially solved killings of Russian journalists critical of the state.