Posted on July 15, 2009 - by Venik

Natalia Estemirova: Award-winning human rights campaigner murdered in Chechnya

Natalia Estemirova found shot dead after being abducted outside her home

One of Russia’s leading human rights campaigners was abducted and murdered today in the turbulent Chechnya region, in a killing that is likely to provoke international outrage and condemnation of the Kremlin’s dismal human rights record.

Natalia Estemirova was pushed into a car by several unknown assailants as she left for work at 8.30am local time, according to her colleague Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya.

Russian news agency Interfax reported this afternoon that Estemirova’s body had been discovered near the neighbouring region of Ingushetia. She was found with two close-range bullet wounds to her head, police said.

Estemirova was a close friend and colleague of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead outside her Moscow flat in October 2006. She worked in Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, for Russia’s oldest human rights organisation, Memorial.

“When Natalia Estemirova was leaving her house in Grozny at 8.30am … she was seized, pushed into a white car and taken in an unknown direction,” Alexander Cherkasov, another Memorial staff member, told Interfax.

He said Estemirova had several scheduled meetings. When she failed to arrive at work, Memorial staff raised the alarm and learned about her abduction from eyewitnesses at her home.

Like Politkovskaya, Estemirova was an outspoken critic of Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin president, Ramzan Kadyrov, who is accused of human rights abuses. She attended the trial in Moscow this year of four people – two of them Chechens – accused of involvement in Politkovskaya’s murder.

Estemirova, who was in her 40s with a teenage daughter, was also a close colleague of Stanislav Markelov, the human rights lawyer murdered in Moscow earlier in January. A masked assassin shot Markelov in the back of the head, not far from the Kremlin. The gunman also killed Anastasia Baburova, a freelance journalist with the Novaya Gazeta newspaper.

Speaking to the Guardian earlier this year, Estemirova described the Politkovskaya trial as a farce. She pointed out that investigators had failed to catch Politkovskaya’s assassin, or those who ordered the murder.

Kadyrov, a close ally of Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has denied accusations he was involved in Politkovskaya’s killing, remarking: “I don’t kill women.”

During an inquiry, which critics described as shambolic, detectives failed to question Kadyrov.

New York-based human rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) today said Estemirova had been killed because she was working on “extremely sensitive” cases of human rights abuses in Chechnya.

“There is no shred of doubt that she was targeted due to her professional activity,” Tanya Lokshina, HRW’s Moscow researcher said.

Estemirova has worked at the Memorial human rights centre in Grozny since 2000. She has received many awards for her work, including the Anna Politkovskaya award from Raw in War, an organisation supporting women in armed conflicts, and the European parliament’s Robert Schuman medal in 2005. Chechen authorities have repeatedly expressed their discontent with her work.

Original article

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