Man charged a man with killing Anna Politkovskaya, the independent journalist shot in a contract-style killing

Investigators in Moscow said they had charged a man with killing Anna Politkovskaya, the independent journalist shot in a contract-style killing in 2006. They said they had issued an international arrest warrant for the man, Mustam Makhmudov, who was described as a 34-year-old Chechen and the “executor of the crime.” The authorities have arrested several other men in the case and have said they believe that the crime was ordered from abroad, a contention Ms. Politkovskaya’s friends have said is meant to divert attention from people in Russia who ordered her killing. Ms. Politkovskaya, a special correspondent at the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was an unflinching critic of Vladimir V. Putin, the former president.