It is in Mr Putin's interest that the perpetrators of the death of Anna Politkovskaya be brought swiftly to justice, writes Séamus Martin
The little shrine set up in the offices of Novaya Gazeta in Moscow following the death of Anna Politkovskaya was adorned, in traditional style, with a Russian Orthodox icon and a photograph of the murdered journalist. Flowers, arranged in even numbers, were placed around the shrine, because in Russia even numbers are for the dead and odd numbers for the living.
The fleeting images of this shrine shown on television showed that photographs of two men were also on display, since Anna Politkovskaya was the third journalist from the newspaper to have died in suspicious circumstances.
In May 2000 Igor Domnikov was badly beaten to the head outside his Moscow apartment block and died in hospital two months later from brain damage. It is believed that Domnikov's murder was a case of mistaken identity and that the intended victim had been another Novaya Gazeta journalist, Oleg Sultanov, who lived in the same building and was investigating corruption in the oil industry.
The third face on the shrine was that of a man I knew quite well. Yuri Shchekochikhin was deputy editor of the paper and a parliamentary deputy for the pro-western Yabloko party. Yuri was a cheerful man with a mischievous smile. I met him several times in his office in the parliament building to chat over a glass or two of his favourite Armenian brandy.
Shchekochikhin had been famous in the Soviet era for his exposés in Literaturnaya Gazeta of corruption inside the Communist Party. Ironically it was not until he continued his investigations in the post-Communist era that things went badly wrong. In June 2003 Yuri was working on two controversial stories. One concerned tax fraud in a company run by former KGB officers and another involved looking at the series of apartment-block bombings that killed 300 people in Moscow and elsewhere in 1999.
After a visit to the city of Ryazan he developed a slight fever and then his face and body broke out in blisters similar to that of Viktor Yushchenko, who was to become President of Ukraine. The Ukrainian politician survived and was diagnosed in Austria as having been poisoned with dioxin.
Yuri Shchekochikhin was not so lucky. Nine days later he died a horrible death which was officially attributed to Lyell's Syndrome, a very rare allergic reaction. Journalists on Novaya Gazeta began their own investigation, which was thwarted when Shchekochikhin's medical file was made subject to Russia's version of the Official Secrets Act.
Although two journalists, Dmitri Krikoryants of Ekspress Khronika and Yuri Soltis of the Interfax News Agency, had been killed earlier, the first murder to attract international attention was that of Dmitri Kholodov, a young reporter from the popular newspaper Moskovskiy Komsomolets, in October 1994. Kholodov was investigating corruption in the army and received a message that he should collect important information contained in a briefcase at the Kazan railway station in Moscow. When he opened the briefcase back in his office it exploded and he was literally blown to pieces.
At funeral services in Russia the coffin is left open with the body on view to the public. In Kholodov's case his injuries had been so severe that a heavy veil was placed over the coffin. The funeral was attended by most liberal politicians and a host of Russian and foreign journalists, some of whom, myself included, were roughed up by Moscow policemen on their way into the service.
Since Kholodov's death a score of Russian journalists have been murdered. Many others died in the war zone of Chechnya and eight, including cameraman Rory Peck from Derry, were killed in events that followed the shelling of parliament by forces loyal to President Yeltsin in October 1993.
Most of those murdered had been investigating criminal activities or corruption. The article Anna Politkovskaya had been preparing related to activities in Chechnya. Former president Mikhail Gorbachev, a director of Novaya Gazeta, was probably correct in stating that allegations that she had been murdered by the Russian state were "too simplistic".
In the case of her two Novaya Gazeta colleagues, Igor Domnikov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, the likelihood was that criminals or former KGB officers were responsible. In Anna Politkovskaya's case the finger of suspicion has already been pointed at pro-Moscow Chechen groups, especially those associated with Ramzan Kadyrov, the current prime minister of the Chechen republic.
Ms Politkovskaya was Kadyrov's most vehement critic and had described his appointment as the biggest mistake of President Putin's career. The president, for his part, was no admirer of Ms Politkovskaya's work but described her death as "a crime of loathsome brutality".
The murder has undoubtedly damaged Russia's more recent image of a country progressing towards democracy which had begun to put its violent past behind it, and this image, it should be said, was essentially a true one.
For this reason it is in Mr Putin's interest and that of his country that the perpetrators are brought swiftly to justice.
• Séamus Martin is a retired Moscow Correspondent and International Editor of The Irish Times.