A Russian newspaper today published the unfinished final article on torture in Chechnya that Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist, was working on when she was murdered.

Ms Politkovskaya, 48, died in an apparent contract killing on Saturday, shot four times as she emerged from the lift in her Moscow apartment block. Thousands turned out to mourn her when she was buried in a cemetery in the outskirts of Moscow yesterday.

The journalist made her name covering Russian atrocities during the first Chechen war and was renowned as one of the last reporters who still dared to criticise President Putin.

On Friday, the day before her murder, Ms Politkovskaya told Radio Liberty that she was working on a piece on how the Russian-backed Chechen regime was using torture.

Her newspaper, the bi-weekly Novaya Gazeta, said today that everyone was asking whether her death was linked to her announcement that she was working on the article - a question it did not attempt to answer.

Instead, under the headline "Let's call you a terrorist - the policy of anti-terrorist torture in the Northern Caucasus", it published various fragments from the unfinished articles.

The piece includes stills from a gruesome video in which two Chechen torturers - "presumably, employees of one of the Chechen power structures" - have an expletive-filled conversation about how hard it is to kill their victims.

"Are we fighting legally against lawlessness?" Ms Politkovskaya asks. "Or are we thrashing them with our own lawlessness?"

The story includes written testimony from a Chechen who was extradited from Ukraine to a Chechen government office in Grozny, where he was allegedly hung by his hands and feet from a pole and beaten, subjected to electric shock and suffocated with a bag over his head to force him to confess to killings he said he did not commit.

He was forced to make the confession to journalists, telling them - on his interrogators’ orders - that his injuries were sustained during an escape attempt.

"When prosecutors and judges work not for the law and punishment of the guilty, but on political orders and in pursuit of anti-terrorist aims that are pleasing to the Kremlin, then criminal cases multiply like hot cakes," Ms Politkovskaya wrote.

Some of Ms Politkovskaya's colleagues have suggested that her murder could have been connected with her appearance on Radio Liberty the day before, when she had told listners that she was working on the story and that she was serving as a witness in in criminal investigations into allegations of torture in Chechnya.

But others thought it could have been connected to any number of her stories, which focused on the abuse of civilians by the armed forces and security services, the circumstances surrounding the 2002 Moscow theatre siege and the 2004 Beslan school tragedy.

It is clear, however, that the killing was carefully planned - the killer is said to have had at least three accomplices, knew her movements and had access to the security access code for her building.

The issue has overshadowed a visit by President Vladimir Putin to Germany, during which protesters have repeatedly chanted "murderer" at him. Mr Putin has pledged a full investigation into the journalist's killing.

Today, Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed Russian Prime Minister, repeated his denail of any part in the murder.

"I don’t kill women and never have. Women should be loved; for us Chechens, a woman is sacred," he said. "I think that those who ordered Anna Politkovskaya’s murder wanted to blacken me."

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