'More dangerous... than an atomic bomb'

2001 Press Gazette interview with murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (previous post):

She was marched into the middle of a field for more than an hour. “Then an armoured vehicle arrived filled with armed fighters. They seized me, pushed me with their rifle butts and took me away.”

She won’t go into the full details of what happened over the next few days, other than to say they were “disgusting” and “utterly obscene”.

But she says: “My tormentors couldn’t have imagined they were providing me with the key proof that everything the Chechens had told me about torture and manhandling was true.”

Her captors found the pictures of her children and told her in graphic detail what they would do to them.

A lieutenant colonel switched on “what he imagined was romantic music” and made it clear what she’d have to do to expect a “favourable outcome”. She refused. “Then he looked as his watch and said, ‘Let’s go. I’m going to shoot you’. He took me out of the tent. It was pitch dark. We walked a short distance and he said, ‘Ready or not, here I come’. Suddenly there was a terrible racket, screeching and flames.” A mortar had been fired right next to her.

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She was standing in a square in Grozny a few weeks after her article about the camps had been published. An officer came to her said: “I’ve read your work, and I’d like to talk to you.”

But then a general approached: “I would like to shoot you for what you’ve written. You’re more dangerous for us than an atomic bomb.”

Politkovskaya shrugs. “All I do is write. I think this is a big exaggeration of the work of a journalist.”