Peace and Justice Post

Human rights group will not retract its assertion that campaigner was shot dead with official backing

Luke Harding in Moscow

The Observer, Sunday 19 July 2009

Human rights campaigners in Russia said yesterday that they were prepared to defend themselves in court after Chechnya‘s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, announced he was suing over claims that he is a murderer.

Oleg Orlov, head of the Memorial human rights organisation, said he stood by remarks he made last week after the killing of the human rights activist Natalia Estemirova.

Estemirova, 50, was abducted last Wednesday from her home in Chechnya’s capital, Grozny. Her body was discovered in the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia. She had been shot in the head and chest.

Estemirova worked for Memorial in Grozny for nearly a decade and documented extrajudicial killings, disappearances and numerous other human rights abuses in the Muslim republic under Kadyrov’s rule. She was a close friend of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was shot dead in Moscow in October 2006.

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