By Claire Bigg

During the years she spent chronicling the horrors of the wars in Chechnya, Anna Politkovskaya had countless brushes with death.

She traveled about 50 times to Chechnya's war-shattered towns and villages. During one of her trips to the war-torn republic, she was held for three days in a ditch, threatened with rape by her captors, and subjected to a mock execution. She once briefly fled to Austria after a particularly bloodcurdling death threat. In 2004, she narrowly survived an apparent poisoning on her way to help mediate during the Beslan school hostage siege in Ingushetia.

But on October 7, 2006, there was no mercy. She was shot three times in the chest and once in the head as she stepped into the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. She was 48.

"It was a huge loss for me. Her death left a void. She's gone," says Pavel Felgenhauer, a defense analyst and columnist for Politkovskaya's newspaper, "Novaya gazeta," who was a close friend.

"She was a very edgy, abrupt woman, and you couldn't hold her back," he adds. "On the whole, she was a difficult person. And of course, she was also an excellent journalist. So she's hard to forget. She was very vibrant, both as a woman and as a journalist."

Suspected Chechen Connection

While the precise motives behind her killing remain unclear, few have doubts it is connected to her investigative work. Not only because her slaying bore all the hallmarks of a contract killing, but also since her relentless attacks on President Vladimir Putin's regime and its campaign in Chechnya had earned her many powerful enemies.

In less than a decade at "Novaya gazeta," Politkovskaya wrote some 600 articles and several award-winning books cataloguing the killings, abductions, and torture of civilians in Chechnya. Some 40 criminal cases were opened as a result of her work.

On the day of her slaying, she was due to file an article exposing cases of torture by members of the "Kadyrovtsy," the personal militia of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, whom she once likened to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Investigation Sheds Little Light

The yearlong investigation has yet to shed light on Politkovskaya's slaying. Russian Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika announced in August that the shooting was carried out by a Moscow-based gang led by an ethnic Chechen. He said 10 people had been arrested, including a member of the Federal Security Service and several former and active police officers.

Chaika also claimed that the crime was masterminded from abroad and aimed at discrediting Putin ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections -- a thinly-veiled swipe at Boris Berezovsky, the self-exiled Russian billionaire and a fierce Kremlin critic.

Within days, however, two of the suspects were released. Russian media reports cast doubt on the involvement of two other detainees.

Politkovskaya's friends and colleagues, as well as her son Ilya, have accused Chaika of undermining the investigation and politicizing the case.

The probe has also raised eyebrows among media watchdogs. "We were very relatively confident, but much has since happened," says Elsa Vidal, who is responsible for covering Europe and the former Soviet Union at Reporters Without Borders.

"We are now in a very uncertain period of reshuffles, both in the government and in the Prosecutor-General's Office," Vidal says. "It is currently impossible to clearly identify the person in charge of this case. We feel a struggle is taking place among the authorities to prevent the case from following a normal course."

Message To Russia's Journalists

Politkovskaya was aware of the danger she faced. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Russia is the third deadliest country in the world for reporters. She was the 13th journalist to be killed in a contract-style murder since Putin came to power in 2000. None of the killings have been solved.

Vidal says Politkovskaya's assassination nonetheless marked a watershed. "It was a turning point in the sense that it sent the following message to Russian journalists: 'Even those among you who are the best-known and respected abroad can be murdered.' This was a very strong message that I think made a lasting mark on the minds of journalists," she says. "When such an crime takes place, the absence of a swift punishment to set it off contributes to fueling a climate of intimidation and self-censorship."

At "Novaya gazeta," however, reporters are determined to carry on the work of their slain colleague. "We aren't scared," says Sergei Sokolov, the newspaper's deputy editor. "Unfortunately, five of our correspondents have already been killed. Of course, this situation deals us a very severe blow and there was even a time when the veterans working here considered shutting down the newspaper, which younger journalists barred us from doing. Gradually, with different people, we are trying to continue Anna's work."

'Nothing Has Changed'

One year after her killing, Politkovskaya's friends and colleagues are still heartbroken. And many, like Oleg Panfilov, who heads the Moscow Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations and had known Politkovskaya for 15 years, fear her death was in vain.

"I can't say the murder of a good journalist, a candid journalist, a courageous journalist, will in any way change the state of affairs in Russia," Panfilov says. "Over the past few months, I've become aware that Anna's death may be forgotten."

This feeling is echoed by Felgenhauer. "Of course it doesn't change anything," he says. "Only the fact that there is one fewer honest, active journalist around -- and these are rare in Russia. So things have only changed for the worse. Those who knew her will remember her, but others will forget."

Panfilov predicts that the first anniversary of Politkovskaya's slaying, which will be marked around the world, will go largely unnoticed in Russia. His center has been distributing posters, stickers, and banners to honor his friend's memory. But many of the prints, he says, still lie unwanted.