The Prague City Council decided to name an alley not far from the Russian embassy after Anna Politkovskaya, an anti-Kremlin journalist who was murdered in 2006.
The alley is located in the district of Bubeneč, which also houses the Russian embassy building.
“The decision to name an alley after Anna Politkovskaya was made simultaneously with the decision to rename the Pod Kaštany Square after Boris Nemtsov,” the mayor said.
According to Prague Mayor Hřib, the move is intended to express solidarity with the Russian opposition.
Prague’s move is likely to reignite tensions with the Russian embassy, which has previously criticized local authority leaders over the treatment of a statue of a decorated Soviet general, Marshal Ivan Konev, after it was reinscribed to qualify his earlier official status as a “saviour” in the second world war, before being covered up to deter vandals.
Politkovskaya case
On October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a columnist at the Novaya Gazeta daily, was shot dead in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. The court found that in July 2006 Chechen native Lom-Ali Gaitukayev got a contract for killing Politkovskaya.
He recruited a team of senior Interior Ministry officer Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, the Makhmudov brothers and former police officer Sergey Khadzhikurbanov, who was released from prison in September 2006.
Investigators found out that Pavlyuchenkov had ordered his subordinates to track Politkovskaya’s daily movements. Later, he handed over this information and a weapon to the perpetrator of the crime, Rustam Makhmudov and his accomplices.
All detained defendants in the case have been sentenced by the Moscow City Court to lengthy prison terms. Pavlyuchenkov identified exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky and Chechen militant leader Akhmed Zakayev as the masterminds of the murder.
