Kazakh police say they’ve solved the brutal Almaty murder of a Kyrgyz journalist after well over a year. Anyone expecting that the killing was linked to the work of renowned investigative reporter Gennadiy Pavlyuk will be surprised: Kazakhstan’s cops have reached the conclusion that the journalist was hurled to his death, hands and legs bound, from the sixth floor in a robbery gone wrong.“It has been established by the preliminary investigation that the suspects lured G. Pavlyuk to Almaty through an Internet exchange, booking a room in the Kazakhstan Hotel, after which by deception they took the journalist to an apartment on Furmanov Street,” Interior Ministry spokesman Kuanyshbek Zhumanov told a briefing March 24 in remarks quoted by Kazakhstan Today news agency. They then tied him up and tried to extort valuables, Zhumanov continued, “but, not achieving what they desired, they threw the journalist out of the apartment window.” This story appears to raise more questions than it answers. Why did the three suspects (two citizens of Kazakhstan and one of Kyrgyzstan) consider it worthwhile to lure a journalist not known for his lavish lifestyle 200 kilometers from Bishkek to obtain his worldly goods, and then defenestrate him when they failed? The casual observer might suppose that the extortionists would have been better off picking on a wealthy Kazakh businessman or even a random client leaving one of the city’s swish nightclubs, rather than duping an investigative reporter.And why has it taken the police a full six months since the arrests of the first suspects to obtain the information that all the criminals wanted was his valuables?Ever since Pavlyuk was found dead on December 16, 2009, members of Central Asia’s journalistic community have suspected that there’s more to this case than meets the eye. Pavlyuk, after all, was a frequent critic of then-Kyrgyzstan President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who showed little tolerance for a free press. The latest police breakthrough is unlikely to end suspicions of a connection, or lay to rest concerns over whether justice will be done in this gruesome killing.