Just two days after the judge declared the trial of three men suspected of involvement in Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s murder would be open to the public, reporters were ordered to clear the courtroom. The presiding judge declared that the 20 selected jurors had requested closed proceedings. The defendants’ lawyers, Politkovskaya’s family and her former employer, Novaya Gazeta, decried the move.
In 2004, Anna Politkovskaya appeared in Wide Angle’s The Russian Newspaper Murders, two years before she herself was murdered.