Two days after his detention, Rustam Makhmudov was formally charged with the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya.
On 2 June 2011, two days after being detained in Chechnya, Rustam Makhmudov was formally charged by Russian prosecutors with the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, according to Amnesty International's case documentation. The charge followed years of investigation, false starts, and an earlier trial in 2009 that had resulted in the acquittal of several co-defendants, a verdict that was widely criticized by human rights organizations and press freedom advocates as reflecting deep flaws in the Russian judicial process.
Makhmudov's formal charging set the stage for a subsequent retrial process that would eventually, in 2014, result in convictions for him and several accomplices, including Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, who was found to have organized the killing. However, even after these convictions, the question of who had commissioned the murder—widely suspected to be a powerful figure with motive to silence Politkovskaya's reporting—remained officially unresolved, a point of continuing frustration for her family, colleagues, and international observers.
The formal charging of Makhmudov represented an important, if incomplete, milestone in the pursuit of accountability for one of the most notorious killings of a journalist in post-Soviet Russian history, and it was closely followed by international media and human rights monitors as a test of Russia's willingness to confront violence against its press corps.