Politkovskaya last report describes police torture

MOSCOW, Oct 12 (Reuters) The last article written by murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was an account from a Chechen man who said police passed electric shocks through his fingers until he confessed to terrorism.

Politkovskaya's Novaya Gazeta newspaper today published the article she was working on when she was shot on the staircase of her apartment building on October 7. Investigators say her murder was linked to her reporting.

The murder of Politkovskaya, an ardent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and of Kremlin policies in Chechnya, brought international condemnation. Her supporters said it showed Russia was failing to safeguard freedom of speech.

It also re-focussed attention on Chechnya, where human rights groups say Russian forces and their local allies are conducting a campaign of indiscriminate violence under the cover of fighting an anti-Moscow insurgency.

A senior prosecutor said today there was ''progress'' in the search to find Politkovskaya's killer.

''I have information which merits attention,'' Interfax news agency quoted Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Buksman as saying.

He refused to comment on newspaper reports police were holding a man who confessed to killing the journalist.

Politkovskaya's unfinished last article reproduces a letter from a Chechen man called Beslan Gadayev who writes that he was extradited from Ukraine and handed over to law enforcement officers in the Chechen capital, Grozny.

RUBBER TRUNCHEONS ''I swore I had killed no one,'' the letter read. ''They said: 'No, you have killed.'' Gadayev wrote that he was punched twice in the face and then handcuffed and suspended from a length of pipe between two filing cabinets in an investigator's office.

''They attached wires to my little fingers. Seconds later they started to give me electric shocks and at the same time beat me with rubber truncheons,'' he said. ''I do not know how long this went on for.'' The report said Gadayev confessed soon after to taking part in an armed attack on police and is now in prison awaiting trial.

Law enforcement officials in Chechnya could not immediately be reached for comment on his case. Russian officials have in the past denied systematic abuse of prisoners.

Gadayev's account was typical of the hundreds of allegations of brutality in Chechnya made by Politkovskaya and human rights campaigners.

In her report, Politkovskaya said the abuse was provoking hundreds of law-abiding young Chechens to take up arms and join the insurgency.

Novaya Gazeta also published grainy pictures taken from a video footage in Politkovskaya's possession which, it said, showed Chechen security forces swearing at two young men, one of whom was covered in blood.

The newspaper said she was planning a second report to accompany the video tape but was killed before she could write it.

Reuters MQA DB2005