Hundreds mark killings of reporter and lawyer

MORE than 200 people yesterday commemorated the deaths of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old trainee reporter, who were shot dead on 19 January in central Moscow.

Ms Baburova worked for Russia's leading investigative newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, which has lost four reporters in the past eight years; one beaten to death, one allegedly poisoned, and now two shot dead on the street. Ms Baburova was shot execution-style by a masked man with a silenced pistol as she walked a few blocks from the Kremlin. Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter who savaged the Kremlin for its conduct of the war on Chechen separatists, was executed outside her Moscow home in 2006. In the latest killing, it appears Mr Markelov, who specialised in defending Chechens and human rights activists, was the primary target and Ms Baburova may have been killed after she tried to intervene.

"Every two or three years, we lose someone," said Elena Kostyuchenko, a 21-year-old investigative reporter.