Putin's spokesman said it was 'very difficult' to investigate contract killings. The room features a desk, an old computer, and the murdered reporter's glasses perched on a copy of Russia's criminal code. Politkovskaya's office has been turned into a small museum in her memory, which was unveiled in the presence of foreign diplomats Thursday. Free journalism is shut down and a veil of darkness has covered Chechnya for 15 years,' he tweeted. Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, put it more bluntly. 'Much of what she wrote turned out to be a prophecy,' Politkovsky said. Politkovskaya's son said his mother would not have been surprised by the current crackdown had she been alive. The commemorative events at Novaya Gazeta's editorial offices in Moscow came amid an unprecedented crackdown on the opposition and independent media, with authorities imprisoning Russia's top opposition politician Alexei Navalny. 'From the very first days no one has been looking for him.' 'The political leadership knows the name of the mastermind,' deputy editor Sergei Sokolov told reporters. Novaya Gazeta has for years conducted its own investigation, but even its staff have not reached a united opinion on the identity of the murder's architects. Still, Muratov said he was far from satisfied and not sure if the letter was merely a 'bureaucratic trick.' Novaya Gazeta editors say the authorities have no real interest in pursuing the investigation any further for political reasons, and on Thursday the statute of limitations on the crime expired.Д«ut chief editor Dmitry Muratov told AFP that the newspaper had received a letter from the Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes in Russia, saying that the investigation would continue. 'Neither I nor Novaya Gazeta have a final understanding of who ordered' the hit, her son Ilya Politkovsky, 42, told AFP on Thursday. But 15 years on, investigators have yet to say who was behind the apparent contract killing.

Nor memory