38 Time August 19, 2019parents. Orkhan and I have a son. In some
ways my work had prepared me for vic-
timhood; I have written about hundreds
of criminal cases in which the interests of
regular people are barely taken into ac-
count. But I never realized what it really
means to be a victim, or as the cops like to
call me, a terpila, their heartless slang for
someone who is forced to endure.
Look up the word terpila in the Rus-
sian dictionary, and you will find several
definitions—including “a weakling inca-
pable of self- defense.” Indeed, that pretty
much describes how I feel after dealing
with Russian investigators in the year
since Orkhan was murdered.
I should clarify something before
going further: as an official victim in this
case, I have signed an agreement with
the Russian authorities “on the nondis-
closure of information on the preliminary
investigation.” It prohibits me from shar-
ing what I know of the police work be-
hind this case. But I’m not too worried
about violating that agreement, because
I haven’t seen much police work going on.
My main point of contact among the
investigators has been Detective Igor E.
Zolotov, a beefy man who keeps his hair
cut close to his skull. If there had been
some police work for him to demonstrate,
perhaps he would have shown me the case
files already—as the law allows. But he
has always refused, each time throwing
a thoughtful glance at the thick binder
that sits atop his desk whenever I visit
his office, its cover marked with the ini-
tials CAR, for Central African Republic.
Apart from Zolotov, I’ve had appoint-
ments with three other investigators over
the past year, all related to my status as a
victim. All of them were irreproachably
polite yet turned pale each time I began to
demand answers to the most elementary
questions. They would sigh and complain
that there’s nothing to be done.The official Theory offered by the
Investigative Committee, Russia’s ver-
sion of the FBI, is that the murder was
committed during a robbery by Arabic-
speaking bandits who are active in that
part of Africa. I categorically reject this
explanation. There is not a single piece of
evidence to support the notion that this
was a robbery. The most valuable posses-
sions of the victims were left untouched
at the scene of the crime.Yet the authorities in Russia offer no
other explanations. They seem content to
blame their own inaction on the police in
central Africa. All they do is wait for an-
swers to arrive from that continent far,
far away. And so, as far as I can see, the
Investigative Committee has managed to
do nothing at all.
The last time I went to see Zolotov, on
July 10, my hope was to find out about a
legal request my lawyers had filed exactly
a month earlier, through the official chan-
nels of the committee. Our request was
simple: take the article published by my
newspaper under the headline ChroniCle
of a well- orChesTraTed deaTh, and
include it in the official case file.
The article was based on a private in-
vestigation carried out by a consortium
of journalists known as the Dossier Cen-
ter. Like Orkhan’s last reporting trip—
the trip to Africa that got him killed—the
work of the Dossier Center was sponsoredby the Russian businessman Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, who supports a variety
of journalistic efforts from exile in Lon-
don. Khodorkovsky does this as part of
his vocal opposition to the Putin regime
and out of a desire to hold it to account.
The investigation found that the mur-
der of Orkhan and his colleagues was not
the work of “Arabic- speaking bandits.”
The ones responsible are the men Orkhan
went there to investigate, the report al-
leges. Among them is Evgeny Prigozhin, a
businessman known as “ Putin’s chef ” be-
cause of his close ties to the Kremlin.
Along with our legal request, we pro-
vided documents to support the conclu-
sions of the Dossier investigation. These
documents implicate known associates of
the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary
company that has been linked to Prigozhin
ever since it first gained attention in 2014,
though Prigozhin denies any connection.
It’s widely known that the hired guns
of the Wagner Group have been active in
the Central African Republic since at least
2017, helping to train the local military
and secure gold mines. And cell-phone re-
cords obtained from the CAR show thatThe Guardians
^
A tribute to the three slain Russian
journalists outside the Central House of
Journalists in Moscow on Aug. 1, 2018