Unknown assassin

The New York Times has an editorial about Anna Politkovskaya:

Five years after the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was brutally shot in her Moscow apartment building, there have been no convictions for her murder.
Prosecutors badly botched the 2009 trial of the alleged lookout, the getaway driver, and another participant. All were acquitted, and the country’s Supreme Court has ordered a retrial. In June, police arrested a man they claim was the gunman, and, last month, the former leader of Moscow’s internal affairs department was charged with providing surveillance data and the weapon used in the shooting. We hope the legal system does better, but we are not optimistic. Meanwhile, the mastermind or masterminds behind the assassination have not been found.
Unfortunately, this is the norm in Russia, where 52 journalists have been killed since 1992, with eighteen of those cases still unsolved. Numerous other journalists have been beaten, harassed, threatened, or jailed after uncovering crimes by business, government or military leaders.
Politkovskaya was known for her tough reporting on human rights abuses in Chechnya. Her last article, published after her death, described how troops loyal to a Kremlin-backed leader in Chechnya tortured civilians. Novaya Gazeta, the rare independent Russian newspaper where she worked, is still fearlessly reporting.
At the time of her murder, Vladimir Putin, now the prime minister but the president then, dismissed her journalism as “insignificant” and said that nobody “currently in office” could possibly have organized a crime that, he said, was committed “to create a wave of anti-Russian feeling.” To many Russians, that sounded like orders from the top that police or judges or prosecutors should take care not to accuse anyone in power.
Five years later, the failure to find her killers is a shameful reminder of the weakness of Russia’s democracy and the corruption of its political system. No one will forget.

Rico says imagine if George Bush had ordered Katie Couric killed for her reporting...