MOSCOW: Russia remains among the most dangerous countries for journalists because of the government’s failure to investigate thoroughly the murders of a dozen reporters and editors over the past five years, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists said here on Friday.

There have been few arrests and no convictions in the murders of the 12 journalists, Ann Cooper, the executive director, said at a news conference, held a day before the first anniversary of the slaying of American journalist Paul Klebnikov.

Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes Magazine, was shot to death as he walked from his office toward a subway station. The prosecutor general’s office closed its investigation of Klebnikov’s slaying two weeks ago, saying he was shot on orders from a Chechen guerilla profiled in Klebnikov’s 2003 book, “Conversations with a Barbarian.” Prosecutors asserted that the subject of the book, Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, a former deputy prime minister of Chechnya, was angered by Klebnikov’s negative portrayal of himself and of Islam. Nukhayev and two suspected accomplices are still at large. Two other Chechen men were arrested last fall and charged with participating in the assassination.

In an interview on Friday, Cooper said there was no way to judge the credibility of the official theory of the crime. “The prosecutor-general’s office did not make public evidence in support of this claim, and many people have greeted that statement with great skepticism,” she said. “We would urge the prosecutor-general to explain what evidence they have.”

The US Embassy here released a statement on Friday saying it had asked Russian prosecutors “for more information and for a better understanding of the basis for its conclusion.” American diplomats urged authorities “to continue the investigation until all evidence necessary to explain this crime satisfactorily is uncovered, and until all the perpetrators — both the actual murderers and those who ordered the crime — have been apprehended, prosecuted and held fully accountable for their acts.”

Klebnikov’s case has attracted far more attention than those of 11 Russian journalists slain, apparently in connection with their work, over the past five years. “The authorities have been swifter to respond in this case,” Cooper said. “And I’m sure that the difference is due to the fact that Paul Klebnikov was an American.”

The failure of the justice system in these cases, she said, has had a “chilling effect” on reporters and has seriously restricted the content and scope of news coverage. “We believe there is less freedom of the press here today than there was in the last years of the Soviet Union,” she said.

Representatives of the Committee to Protect Journalists and two Russian journalists groups met privately with the friends and families of the 12 slain writers and editors on Thursday, to compare notes and evaluate how aggressively authorities were pursuing their cases. In the most recent case, Magomedzagid Varisov of the newspaper Novoye Delo was killed by automatic weapons fire near his home in the Russian republic of Dagestan, in the Caucasus, on June 28. Friends and family of those slain said investigators have been reluctant to discuss the cases.

—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service