Today I see the news that they have sentenced a policeman who murdered the journalist Magomed Yevloyev to two years in jail for the killing.  I hate to sound like a broken record, but isn’t a two year sentence for blowing a guy’s head off really messed up?

Over the past few years, there have been scores of murders of government opponents, but Yevloyev’s was probably one of the most outrageous.  No, he didn’t get poisoned by polonium in a London hotel, or get the assassin’s two-tap in a Moscow hallway or sidewalk.  He didn’t get thrown out an apartment window to look like a suicide (from the wrong floor of his building, like Safronov), or picked up in a van and then dumped on a roadside (like Estemirova).  Unlike Aushev, he didn’t get his car shot up with 60 rounds of bullets. 

Yevloyev, who ran the website Ingushetia.ru, apparently had just arrived on a plane from Moscow to the Magas regional airport on August 31, 2008 when he was arrested by the police.  By coincidence, the journalist shared the flight with Ingush president, Murat Zyazikov.  According to Kommersant’s coverage of what happened next, things quickly got ugly: