NY Times: Natalia Estemirova, human rights campaigner who worked to expose government-backed kidnappings in Chechnya, is herself kidnapped and murdered
Natalia Estemirova, was an employee with the Russian human rights group Memorial. She worked for years helping families uncover details about kidnapped relatives. She was the recipient of several international awards, and in 2007 was the first to win the Anna Politkovskaya Award, named for the Russian investigative journalist, who also worked to uncover abuses in Chechnya before she was shot to death in October 2006.
Ms. Estemirova’s work often ran afoul of the Chechen government, led by the Kremlin-backed strongman Ramzan A. Kadyrov, who human rights groups have accused of personally torturing kidnap victims.
The Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, expressed condolences to her relatives and friends in a statement released by the Kremlin.
An employee with Memorial’s Moscow office, Andrei Mironov, said that several men pushed Ms. Estemirova, 50, into a white car as she left for work in the Chechen capital of Grozny about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. Witnesses said that she yelled out that she was being kidnapped. Her body, with gunshots to the head and chest, was found in the afternoon a few hundred yards off a highway in neighboring Ingushetia, according to a statement by the prosecutor general’s investigative wing.
