The Annals of Unsolved Crime (23 page)

The shooter was subsequently identified by authorities as Rustam Makhmudov, a Chechen allegedly employed as a contract killer. He was apparently warned about his imminent arrest and provided with a forged passport, which allowed him to flee Russia. The best that the police could do was to arrest two of his brothers, Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov, as accomplices. They also arrested FSB Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ryaguzov, who was charged with abuse of office and extortion in connection with the assassination.

On February 19, 2009, after a three-month trial, a jury
unanimously acquitted the accused. Since Russia does not proscribe double jeopardy, prosecutors filed a motion to retry the case, which was approved in August 2009. Two years later, they charged Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, a former police lieutenant colonel, with organizing the plot. He then implicated Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former Ministry of the Interior official, who denied the charge. The trial of Pavlyuchenkov in December 2012 was held behind closed doors after the judge ruled that all testimony needed to be kept secret. According to
Novaya Gazeta
, the Moscow-based newspaper for which Politkovskaya reported, Pavlyuchenkov claimed in his pretrial testimony that Politkovskaya’s murder was ordered by two London-based enemies of Putin, billionaire Boris Berezovsky and Akhmed Zakayev, an organizer of the Chechen revolt (which coincides with Putin’s theory that the murder was staged as a provocation). Consequently, on December 13, 2012, Pavlyuchenkov was found guilty as an accomplice and sentenced to eleven years imprisonment. None of the testimony in this trial will be made public. (One reason such political crimes remain difficult to resolve in Russia is that potentially embarrassing testimony can be kept secret.) Even if there is a further trial of the perpetrators, which is by no means certain, it will not resolve the real mystery: Who really gave the orders and paid to have Politkovskaya assassinated on Putin’s birthday?

The theory of the prosecution is that the contract to assassinate Politkovskaya ultimately came from the leaders of the Russian-backed regime in Chechnya. She had been exposing their illegal activities, and they hired the killers. A second theory is that Putin’s enemies abroad paid the killers to execute this world-famous journalist on Putin’s birthday to undermine Putin. Finally, there is the theory that Putin himself ordered the hit to intimidate journalists.

The problem in a political crime in which elements of the government, security services, and organized crime rings
collaborate is that while it is possible to arrest the thugs who carried out the contract, the link to those who issued the contract may disappear. What is clear to me is that the murder involved killers for hire, officers in the FSB, and political leaders in Chechnya. My assessment of the case based on interviews in Moscow is that there had to be police involvement that went beyond that of Lieutenant Colonel Pavliuchenkov. The surveillance of Politkovskaya, which was carried out by Pavliuchenkov’s unit, involved, according to the released investigative report, “two shifts: the first one from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., the second one—from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. Each shift included no less than two transportation units, and at least six operatives.” Such a massive operation, even if it is part of a contract killing, suggests a great deal of money and power behind the murder. It is plausible that the contract was given by those leaders in Chechnya who were the targets of Politkovskaya’s investigative reporting. But Moscow’s contract-killings are not always explained by plausible motives. One Russian official I interviewed quoted the famous closing line of the movie
Chinatown
, “Forget it Jake. This is Chinatown,” to make the point that American investigative logic does not apply to Russian mysteries.

CHAPTER 26
BLOWING UP BHUTTO

On December 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto was killed by a suicide bomber in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. Twenty-four other people were also killed in the explosion. Bhutto had just returned from a nine-year exile as part of a deal arranged by the United States. The plan, if it succeeded, would bring about an American-sponsored regime change: Bhutto would run in a nationwide election, win, and replace the faltering military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf.

That afternoon Bhutto spoke at a massive political rally at Liaquat Park, a park named after Pakistan’s founding Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, who, in 1951, was assassinated. Bhutto departed at 5:00 p.m. in a white armored Land Cruiser. As the convoy made a right turn onto the main highway, Bhutto was waving to her supporters through the roof hatch in her car. Then a gunman standing a few feet behind her car fired three shots and also detonated a bomb. The video footage shows that only 1.6 seconds elapsed between the time of the first shot and the detonation of the explosives. Bhutto received a large head wound, and she died in the hospital less than an hour later. Her doctors, finding no bullet wounds, postulated that she died from a head injury caused by the explosion. Since authorities did not permit an autopsy to be conducted, even though it is required by law, the cause of her death was not conclusively determined. Access to the crime-scene investigation was also inexplicably limited by authorities.

Only one bullet casing was recovered, which was traced by
the DNA on it to skull fragments of the suspected gunman. The skull fragment, which was found on the roof of a nearby building, was determined to have come from a boy no more than sixteen years old. Since the crime scene itself was hosed down within an hour of the shooting, other potential clues, including any other DNA evidence, were washed away. (The lone bullet casing was found lodged in a sewer drain.) Similarly, Bhutto’s Land Rover had been scrubbed clean hours after the blast. The extraordinary cleansing of the crime scene before all the evidence could be recovered had been ordered by police authorities. According to the UN commission that investigated the assassination, “Hosing down the crime scene so soon after the blast goes beyond mere incompetence,” and raises the issue of “whether this amounts to criminal irresponsibility.” As a result, it was all but impossible to determine whether the bomber had any accomplices.

Despite the lack of forensic evidence, at a press conference arranged by General Musharraf the very next day, it was announced that Bhutto’s assassination had been organized by Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan, assisted by al-Qaeda. The government spokesman said that the Pakistan intelligence service had intercepted a message in which Mehsud congratulated a subordinate on the Bhutto assassination. Fugitive warrants were then issued for Mehsud (who was killed in 2009 by a CIA drone attack) and his subordinates. Meanwhile, the UN investigators obtained a transcript of the intercepted message, but it contained no mention of either Mehsud or the Bhutto assassination. Instead, it contained a conversation in which someone called “Emir Sahib” asked another unknown person merely “who were they?” After he was told three names, he said “The three did it?” When U.N. investigators attempted to pursue the matter, the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence arm, claimed that it had been able to identify “Emir Sahib” as Mehsud through a “voice signature,”
and that from the context of the conversation, its analysts assumed that the “it” likely referred to the Bhutto assassination. The ISI also refused to divulge the date of the interception, the means by which it was obtained, or how it was verified. So the U.N. commission was unable to authenticate the official theory of the assassination.

Soon after the December 28 press conference, the authorities in Pakistan, according to the U.N. commission’s report, “essentially ceased investigating the possibility of other perpetrators, particularly those who may have been involved in planning or directing the assassination by funding or otherwise enabling the assassination,” and, by doing so, “ended its efforts to identify the suicide bomber.” The closing-down of an investigation that threatens the stability of a fragile state is not unusual after political assassinations, but it leaves unanswered the question of who killed Bhutto.

At least three theories are consistent with the facts of the case. First, there is the official theory, proposed by then–President Musharraf that the suicide attack had been arranged by Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The problem here is that the announced evidence in support of it turns out to be either bogus or vague. Second, it has been suggested by Bhutto supporters that the attack was allowed to take place by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service, the ISI, to prevent Bhutto from winning the election. The proponents of this theory point to videos showing men in dark glasses along the motorcade route and at the scene of the assassination as evidence of the ISI’s close surveillance of Bhutto. (These videos can be viewed on YouTube.) Finally, there is the theory that Bhutto’s security detail was intentionally reduced by a cabal of ambitious politicians inside Bhutto’s own political party to put her in harm’s way. The proponents of this theory cite the fact that despite credible assassination threats against her, there were gaping holes in her protection.

It would be a mistake, however, to confuse the activities in support of the cover-up, such as literally washing away the evidence at the crime scene, with the assassination itself. We know, as can be seen from the videos, that a young suicide bomber first fired shots at Bhutto and then detonated his suicide vest. The forensic evidence indicates that he was most likely a fifteen-or sixteen-year-old boy from the tribal areas. As Owen Bennett-Jones pointed out in the
London Review of Books
in December 2012, part of the mechanism used in the suicide bomb that was recovered matched those used in eleven other suicide bomb attacks that year in Pakistan. The teenager used in such attacks is in effect a remote-controlled weapon. His actual identity is no more important to solving the mystery than the serial number of a missile fired from a drone. The issue here is: who operated the remote control? My assessment is that that the suicide bomber was trained and dispatched on this mission by a jihadist organization associated with the Pakistani Taliban. The purpose of the attack was to undermine the U.S. initiative to bring about a regime change in Pakistan.

CHAPTER 27
THE CASE OF THE
RADIOACTIVE CORPSE

On December 1, 2006, one of the eeriest autopsies in the annals of crime was conducted at the Royal London Hospital. Three British pathologists, covered from head to toe in white protective suits, stood around a radioactive corpse that had been sealed in plastic for nearly a week. The victim was Alexander Litvinenko, a forty-four-year-old ex-KGB officer who had defected from Russia to England six years earlier. He had been brought to the Barnet General Hospital by his wife, Marina, on November 3, complaining of abdominal pain. During his stay at the hospital his condition continually worsened. The initial diagnosis was that he had been poisoned by thallium, a non-radioactive toxin used in Russian rat poison. Since the KGB had reportedly used thallium as a poison in the Cold War era, and Litvinenko was one of the most severe critics of Russian president Vladimir Putin, the theory gained traction in the press that Litvinenko might have been the victim of the Russian security service, the FSB, which had been created in April 1995 out of the remnants of the KGB. As Litvinenko had been writing exposés of putative FSB operations in London, it seemed at least plausible that the FSB had taken revenge on him. The possibility that Russia was poisoning opponents abroad resonated in the world press, since, less than a month
earlier, Anna Politkovskaya, a crusading journalist, had been murdered in Moscow.

Meanwhile, Litvinenko was moved to University College Hospital and given massive doses of the cyanide-based antidote for thallium, which did not work. As his condition grew critical, one of his associates, Alex Goldfarb, prepared for Litvinenko’s end by writing out his “deathbed” statement, which, according to Goldfarb, was drawn from statements that Litvinenko had dictated to him accusing Putin of orchestrating his murder. When Litvinenko died on November 23, 2006, Goldfarb released the sensational deathbed accusation at a hastily called press conference at the hospital. It made headlines around the world.

Just two hours before Litvinenko died, another startling surprise developed in the story: new tests at the hospital discovered that he had not been poisoned with thallium or a rat poison based on it. Instead, they showed that he had in his body one of the world’s most tightly controlled radioactive isotopes, polonium-210. Polonium was discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie and named in honor of Poland, where Marie was born. The reason that this rare isotope was controlled is that it is a critical component in early-stage nuclear bombs. Both America and the Soviet Union used it as part of the trigger in their early bomb designs. So did most, if not all, countries with clandestine nuclear programs, including Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Africa. North Korea had also used it for its nuclear test just six weeks before Litvinenko’s contamination in London. Although most of the major nuclear powers shifted to more sophisticated tritium-based triggers after they tested their weapons, for nuclear-ambitious countries, obtaining polonium-210 was crucial step toward obtaining a bomb. And, as a declassified Los Alamos document notes, the detection of polonium-210 remains “a key indication of a nuclear weapons program in its early stages.” When polonium-210 was
detected in Iraq in 1991, Iran in 2004, and North Korea in October 2006, it immediately raised suspicions of rogue bomb-building programs. Therefore, its presence would normally be of great interest to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N.’s nuclear-proliferation watchdog, as well as the intelligence services of the United States, Great Britain, and Israel.

When polonium-210 was discovered in Litvinenko’s body in late November 2006, however, no such proliferation alarm bells went off. Instead, the police assumed that this component of early-stage nuclear bombs had been smuggled into London solely to commit a murder. It would be as if a suitcase nuclear bomb had been found next to an irradiated corpse in London, and everyone assumed the bomb had been smuggled into the country solely to murder that person. Michael Specter, in
The New Yorker
, for example, called it the “first known case of nuclear terrorism perpetrated against an individual.” But why would anyone use a nuclear weapon to kill an individual, when a knife, bullet, or conventional poison would do the trick more quickly, efficiently, and certainly?