Fell violently ill after apparent poisoning aboard a flight to Rostov-on-Don while traveling to cover the Beslan school hostage crisis.
On 1 September 2004, as the Beslan school hostage crisis was unfolding in North Ossetia, Anna Politkovskaya boarded a flight to Rostov-on-Don intending to travel onward to Beslan to report on and potentially assist in negotiations, drawing on her earlier experience during the Moscow theater siege. Shortly after drinking tea served on the flight, she became violently ill, losing consciousness and requiring emergency medical treatment upon landing.
She later stated that she believed she had been deliberately poisoned in an attempt to prevent her from reaching Beslan and reporting on the crisis, in which Chechen and Ingush militants took over 1,100 people, mostly children, hostage at a school, an event that ended in a chaotic and deadly military operation resulting in over 330 deaths, more than half of them children.
The incident was widely interpreted by colleagues and human rights observers as further evidence of the extreme lengths to which unknown actors—believed by many to be linked to Russian security services or their proxies—were willing to go to silence her reporting on the North Caucasus conflicts. It presaged the still more extreme measure of her assassination two years later and remains one of the most cited examples of the physical dangers independent Russian journalists faced when their reporting threatened powerful interests.