One month ago we told you about a key piece of evidence in the murder case of Kremlin critic and human rights journalist Anna Politkovskaya: a video presentation allegedly containing footage of Politkovskaya’s assassin. The trouble then was that the video "went missing" and the trial was put on hold while somebody looked around for a copy. According to British newspaper The Guardian, however, the video itself is as baffling as the fact that it had been “misplaced.” For one thing, it shows a confident assassin entering Politkovskaya’s secured apartment building wearing one cap, and exiting in another. And that’s just a taste of the sloppy and bewildering trial proceedings, which famously ended February 19 with the unanimous acquittal of the three men accused of aiding in the assassination. Reportedly, even Politkovskaya’s children felt that given the “fiasco” of the court procedures, a guilty verdict was inconceivable.

Fast forward just two weeks, and Politkovskaya’s name is largely absent from Russian or English news. If mentioned at all, it comes up only in relation to other famous court cases currently in motion— the resurrected Khodorkovsky trial chief among them. Though the lawyers representing Politkovskaya’s family vowed to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the effectiveness of such a move has been questioned by Politkovskaya’s supporters. In the latest turn of events, Russia's Prosecutor General's Office has appealed against the acquittal to Russia’s Supreme Court. The appeal, which became official February 28, got relatively little coverage, most of it quite brief. A sign, perhaps, that this story’s ultimate ending seems all too predictable.

Photo courtesy of Gulag.ipvnews.org