Investigators have arrested a retired police officer on suspicion of organizing the 2006 murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the Investigative Committee said Wednesday.
Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, then a senior Moscow police investigator, received money from an unknown source to hire the Makhmudov brothers and others, supply them with weapons and develop a plan, the committee said in a statement on its web site.
The statement also said that investigators have information about who might have ordered the killing, but did not give details.
The suspected gunman in the killing, Rustam Makhmudov, was arrested in his native Chechnya in May. Two of his brothers were acquitted of being accomplices in 2009 along with a Moscow police officer whom prosecutors say supplied the murder weapon, but the ruling was later overruled by the Supreme Court. A retrial has yet to start.
Politkovskaya won acclaim for her investigative reports on violence and corruption among government-backed forces in the North Caucasus, a region gripped by a separatist insurgency with increasingly Islamic overtones. Her murder drew international attention to the dangers faced by journalists in Russia and sparked widespread suspicions of a government conspiracy.
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