In the interests of the investigation, Yuri Chaika would not state the names of the 10 suspects whose arrest warrants were ordered by the Basmanniy court in Moscow, though he did state that the gang was responsible for murders for hire not just in Russia, but in the Ukraine and Latvia as well.

The prosecutor general also declared that the murder of the Novaya Gazeta coorespondent was advantageous to certain persons located outside Russia. According to him, these persons tried to use the crime in order to destabilize the situation within the country, change the constitutional order, and bring about the return of an earlier system of government, “when everything was decided by the oligarchy (monopolists).”

Novaya Gazeta correspondent Anna Politikovskaya was murdered on October 7^th, 2006, in the stairwell of her apartment building on

http://top.rbc.ru/incidents/27/08/2007/115011.shtml

in Moscow. A neighbor woman found her bullet-riddled body in the elevator, and a Makarov pistol and four shell casings were found nearby. The Moscow city prosecutor opened a criminal case of “premeditated murder”. According to the investigation’s main theory, the crime was related to the professional activities of the journalist.