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Lawyer, journalist slain outside Moscow news conference

Other News Materials 19 January 2009 22:41 (UTC +04:00)

A lawyer who had protested against the early release of a convicted murderer and a journalist were gunned down after a press conference in central Moscow on Monday, Russian prosecutors said.

Attorney Stanislav Markelov was killed immediately by an assailant armed with a silencer-fitted firearm at around 2 pm (1100 GMT) on Prechistinkaya street, 10 minutes walk from the Kremlin in downtown Moscow, a law enforcement source was quoted by local media as saying, dpa reported.

"An assailant ran behind Markelov and a woman escorting him, Anastasia Baburova, and shot him in the back of the head from point- blank range. The woman tried to get hold of the suspect, but he shot her too," the source told Ria-Novosti.

Baburova, a freelance journalist for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, died in the hospital of a wound to head a few hours later, the doctor who treated her was quoted by news agency Interfax as saying.

Markelov represented the family of a Chechen woman, Kheda Kungayeva, whose murder by a high-ranking Russian military officer in 2000 unleashed a fury of protest against human rights abuses in the region.

Markelov had told reporters he would lodge an international court appeal against the early release of Colonel Yuri Budanov from a 10-year prison term last week, agencies said.

Markelov had also acted for the family of slain Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who wrote extensively on Russian human rights violations in Chechnya.

The editor-and-chief of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov, said the paper had been able to recover a recording of Baburova's interview with Markelov that afternoon.

Muratov did not rule out the possibility that Baburova was also a target in the attack.

Budanov was the first Russian military officer to be prosecuted for killing a civilian during two wars the Kremlin fought in the early 1990s against separatist movements in Chechnya. He confessed to strangling Kungayeva in anger during an interrogation for her suspected role as a sniper.

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