RA’s Daily Russian News Blast – August 12, 2009
‘We thought that after Natalya’s [Estermirova]
death there would at least be a lull’, says the deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Russia on the murder of Save the Generation director Zarema Sadulayeva and her husband. The organization’s former director was also murdered in 2005, the Washington Post reports. ‘Is a death squad roaming Grozny under official sanction or are these horrible but unrelated killings?’ asks the Times. ‘Why aren’t Western governments doing more to hold Moscow accountable?’ demands the New York Times. Ramzan Kadyrov has called it ‘a cynical, inhuman and demonstrative murder’. The Chechen President praised Sadulayeva as someone who ‘was helping people in organizing their medical treatment’, unlike, to his mind, the other recent victim of a slaying, Natalya Estemirova, who ‘was misleading society and writing lies’. A local newspaper journalist has been shot dead in Dagestan as has the region’s construction minister.