A Birthday President For Putin?

Happy birthday, Vladmir!

Did well-wishers say that to Putin when he learned of this?

A journalist who chronicled Russian military abuses against civilians in Chechnya, garnering awards and accolades from around the world, was found shot to death Saturday in her apartment building. Prosecutors suspect her killing could be connected to her investigative reporting.

Anna Politkovskaya, 48, was found dead in an elevator in the building in central Moscow, police, prosecutors and a colleague said.

Prosecutors have opened a murder investigation, said Svetlana Petrenko, spokeswoman for the Moscow prosecutor's office. Investigators suspect the killing could be linked to her work, Vyacheslav Rosinsky, Moscow's first deputy prosecutor, said on state-run Rossiya television.

Politkovskaya, who wrote for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, chronicled the killings, tortures and beatings of civilians by Russian servicemen in Chechnya in reports that put her on a collision course with the authorities but won her numerous international awards.

"People sometimes pay with their lives for saying out loud what they think. People can even get killed just for giving me information," Reporters Without Borders quoted her as saying at a press freedom conference in Vienna in December.

Politkovskaya, who also wrote Putin's Russia, a book critical of Putin, was murdered on Putin's 54th birthday.

Related Tags: Russia, Putin, Chechnya