The retrial of three men allegedly involved in the murder Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya opens before a military court today (5 August) in Moscow. They are former Moscow police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, who is accused of helping to organise the contract-style killing, and two Chechen brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, who are accused of being accessories. They are being retried because prosecutors appealed successfully against their acquittal by a jury last February. But the main protagonists of Politkovskaya’s murder will not be in court tomorrow. They are the alleged the trigger-man, Rustam Makhmudov, who is on the run and believed to be abroad, and those who contracted the killing, whose identity is still unknown.

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