Putin’s racked up quite a body count since he took power.
A prominent Russian human rights activist, Natalia Estemirova, has been found dead in the North Caucasus.
She was bundled into a van and abducted as she left her home in Chechnya on Wednesday morning, a colleague said. Her body was found in Ingushetia.
The Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressed “outrage” at the murder, and ordered a top-level investigation.
Ms Estemirova had been investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya for the independent Memorial group.
Memorial is one of Russia’s best known rights groups, working to document Soviet-era abuses and those taking place more recently, especially in Chechnya.
In recent months, she had been gathering evidence of a campaign of house-burnings by government-backed militias.
Ms Estemirova, who was 50 according to Russian prosecutors, had worked in the past with the activists Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead in 2006, and Stanislav Markelov, who was killed in January this year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8152351.stm
Medvedev expressed “outrage”….that’s as fake as a fucking Potemkin Village. He does exactly what Vladmir Putin tells him to do. The old Soviet Union still lurks at the Kremlin.