Anna  Politkovskaya was no celebrity, at least here in the United States. Sure, we read her work; how could we not? She was one of the few journalists with a an outlet Americans could access who during her time and for once among Russian journalists, actually told truths about senior Russian politicians and how the circle of cronies did what they did.

"Celebri ty" implies that we followed her every move, kept track of who she dated, who she was friends with. Americans did none of that. We simply read what she wrote. She was a writer who was for the most part as honest as she could be and she got killed for it, probably by one of the people she wrote about.

I'm interested to see how RT spins the story, RT of course being owned by some of the very same people she wrote about in a not-so-admiring way. She had long ago removed the "stars in her eyes" about powerful people and was a firm proponent of lifting veils of secrecy, veils of lies, and veils of both media and official state obfuscation. regardless of the medium and regardless of what state she wrote about.

She didn't have the most glowing things to write about the United States all the time --she had apparently nothing but contempt for George Bush's Russian foreign policy, for instance-- but she wrote them anyway and we in America are grateful in the end for her doing so. In the end, a lot of her normative and qualitative statements about how America treats truth-seeking people in other parts of the world turned out to be right.

Americ a certainly could use celebrities like Anna Politkovskay, that's for sure! Paul Klebnikov, too.

Thanks RT for keeping on top of this story, as we can see from the earlier Politkovskaya articles in the right-hand margin of the RT webpage. By showing both the Russian people and the international community that the prosecution of the murder case has not been abandoned, the Russia prosecutor's office is doing a lot to also show that it is taking issues of impunity seriously. 
Politikovskaya has become even more formidable after her death than during her life, but in death, she joins the significant number of courageous Russian journalists who have been murdered for just trying to their job of bringing vital news to the Russian people. If the murder of so many Russian journalists (some Russians say up to 200 over the past 20 years) is not pursued diligently, and impunity challenged, the "chilling effect: of fear on the freedom of the press will be severely impaired.

Pretty simple, it was Putin.