“Moscow’s highest criminal court on Monday sentenced five men to prison, including two to life sentences, for the 2006 murder of the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, but left unsolved the question of who ordered the killing, the highest-profile attack on a Russian journalist of the last decade.
Ms. Politkovskaya, who was known for scathing criticism of Kremlin policies in the Russian republic of Chechnya and of the local strongman Ramzan A. Kadyrov, was 48 when she was shot to death in a contract killing in her Moscow apartment block.
On Monday, Judge Pavel Melyokhin sentenced Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, the organizer of the team that murdered Ms. Politkovskaya, and his nephew Rustam Makhmudov, the gunman, to life sentences in prison.
The sentences for the men, who were convicted last month, were the toughest punishment to date in the long-running investigation into Ms. Politkovskaya’s death.
Yet that investigation has yielded little publicly about who wanted Ms. Politkovskaya killed and why.
“The case cannot be closed because it has not been solved,” Vera Politkovskaya, Ms. Politkovskaya’s daughter, said by telephone.”
Death threats:
In September 2004, while traveling to Beslan, Russia during the Beslan school hostage crisis to help in negotiations with the hostage-takers, Politkovskaya fell violently ill and lost consciousness after drinking tea. She had been reportedly poisoned,[8] with some accusing the former Soviet secret police poison facility.[9]
In December 2005, while attending a conference on freedom of the press organized by Reporters Without Borders in Vienna, Austria, Politkovskaya said: “People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think. In fact, one can even get killed for giving me information. I am not the only one in danger. I have examples that prove it.”[10] She often received death threats as a result of her work,[11] including being threatened with rape and experiencing a mock execution after being arrested by the military in Chechnya.[12]
According to Russian state security officer Alexander Litvinenko, Politkovskaya asked him if her life was in imminent danger before the assassination. He confirmed the danger and recommended her to escape from Russia immediately. He also asserted that former presidential candidate Irina Hakamada warned Politkovskaya about threats to her life coming from Putin.
Hakamada later denied her involvement in passing any specific threats, and said that she warned Politkovskaya only in general terms more than a year before her death.[13]
It remains unclear whether the warning by Litvinenko was related to an earlier statement made by Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who claimed that former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Boris Nemtsov received word from Hakamada that Putin threatened her and like-minded colleagues in person. According to Berezovsky, Putin uttered that Hakamada and her colleagues “will take in the head immediately, literally, not figuratively” if they “open the mouth” about the Russian apartment bombings.[14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Anna_Politkovskaya#Death_threats
I agree with the daughter, but saying the case is “unsolved” is certainly not proof that Putin ordered her murder. At least some of those responsible have received heavy sentences, which will hardly encourage future contract killers.