The Taliban prisoners had been convicted of assassinations of public figures and participation in suicide bombing plots.
A month ago, Mr Shuster's colleague, Leonid Parfyonov - a well known satirist - was taken off air for trying to broadcast an interview with the widow of the slain Chechen leader, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, during the trial of two Russian agents in Qatar, later convicted of the assassination and sentenced to life in prison.
She was later convicted of attempted assassination of the President and was sentenced to life in prison; she was paroled on August 14 , 2009
Three people convicted of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi are still on death row, 21 years after he was killed by a suicide bomb.
And so, when he got a call last year offering him a chance to meet with a repentant Basque terrorist — not the man who killed his father, but a man convicted of several assassinations — he agreed.
Russian courts have sentenced shooters in other high profile political murders like that of journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, but critics say that those convicted of past assassinations were the patsies of larger conspiracies, scapegoated in order to silence critics and weaken Russia's opposition.
Byron De La Beckwith, who was convicted of the 1963 assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers, died tonight at University Medical Center.
Yet he called for the "immediate release" of "pillars" of the prisoner population like Mr. Barghouti and Ahmad Saadat, a leader of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was convicted of ordering the assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister in 2001.
See articleThe government of Tamil Nadu state in India announced that it would free seven people convicted of plotting the assassination in 1991 of Rajiv Gandhi, a former prime minister.
Ms. Reiss was allowed to leave shortly before France released Ali Vakili Rad, who was convicted of the 1991 assassination in suburban Paris of Shapour Bakhtiar, a former Iranian prime minister who served under the shah.
