Members of the Russian security services were involved in a conspiracy with organised crime to assassinate Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist, the country’s chief prosecutor announced yesterday.

Yuri Chaika said that ten people had been arrested for the murder, five of whom were officers of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).

They had tracked Ms Politkovskaya and passed information about her movements to a gang of Chechen hit men who had carried out the killing. She was shot in the lift of her apartment building on October 7, President Putin’s 54th birthday.

“The group was headed by the leader of a Moscow criminal group of Chechen origin,” Mr Chaika, the Prosecutor-General, said. Those arrested included “the organisers, accomplices and hitmen”.

The arrest of security service officers brings the inquiry uncomfortably close to the authorities, whom Ms Politkovskaya had accused repeatedly of collaborating with criminals to eliminate opponents of the Kremlin.

Mr Chaika insisted that the FSB and MVD played no role in the assassination of one of Mr Putin’s most vehement critics. He described the arrested men as “black sheep” in the organisations.

“Former and current officials of the Interior Ministry, as well as officials of the Federal Security Service, helped to follow her and supplied information,” he told a press conference in Moscow. “Their role was to organise surveillance of Politkovskaya and to collect information. They were accomplices. One of them was a police major. He was sacked on the day of his arrest. Another was an official of the Federal Security Service – he was also sacked – and there were another three policemen.” The FSB later named Pavel Ryaguzov, a lieutenant-colonel, as one of the suspects, saying that he was arrested on August 21.

Mr Putin has been under heavy international pressure to solve the murder of Ms Politkovskaya, who would have been 49 on Thursday.

Russian television showed Mr Chaika briefing a sombre-looking Mr Putin on the breakthrough at the President’s country retreat.

Mr Chaika blamed her death on an exiled Russian determined to destabilise the regime. He declined to identify the suspect but said that the victim had “known him and met him”, and that an extradition request would be prepared. In what appeared to be an oblique reference to Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire businessman who has called for the overthrow of Mr Putin’s regime, Mr Chaika said: “Our investigation has led us to conclude that only people living abroad could be interested in killing Politkovskaya. Forces interested in destabilising the country, changing its constitutional order, in stoking crisis, in a return to the old system where money and oligarchs ruled, in discrediting national leadership, provoking external pressure on the country, could be interested in this crime.”

Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper where Ms Politkovskaya worked, welcomed the arrests but said that it was too early to consider the case solved. In a statement it said: “The people who carried this out, their helpers and the real people who ordered this, must be identified and convicted.” Mr Chaika said the same gang could also have been involved in the murder in 2004 of Paul Klebnikov, an American journalist, and of Andrei Kozlov, the deputy head of the Russian Central Bank, who was shot in September.

Mr Putin stayed silent for 48 hours after Ms Politkovskaya’s death, then suggested that the killing could have been ordered by enemies of the Kremlin to harm Russia’s image.

Ms Politkovskaya was one of the few journalists to criticise Mr Putin openly, particularly in relation to atrocities in Chechnya, the North Caucasus conflict that propelled him into the Kremlin in 2000. Initial speculation focused on Ramzan Kadyrov, Mr Putin’s appointee as President of Chechnya, who denied any involvement. Two days before she died Ms Politkovskaya revealed that she would appear as a witness in a torture and kidnapping case that would implicate Mr Kadyrov, adding that it was her dream to see him prosecuted in court.

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