Moscow ? A journalist who chronicled Russian military abuses against civilians in Chechnya, garnering awards and accolades from around the world, was found shot to death Saturday in her apartment building. Prosecutors suspect her killing could be connected to her investigative reporting.

Anna Politkovskaya, 48, was found dead in an elevator in the building in central Moscow, police, prosecutors and a colleague said.

Prosecutors have opened a murder investigation, said Svetlana Petrenko, spokeswoman for the Moscow prosecutor’s office. Investigators suspect the killing could be linked to her work, Vyacheslav Rosinsky, Moscow’s first deputy prosecutor, said on state-run Rossiya television.

Rosinsky said a pistol and bullets were found at the site of the crime. The RIA-Novosti news agency, citing police officials, reported that Politkovskaya was shot twice, the second time in the head.

The ITAR-Tass news agency reported that work was under way on a composite sketch of the attacker based on footage recorded by a security camera at the building. The assailant, believed to have acted alone, wore black.

Politkovskaya, who wrote for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, chronicled the killings, tortures and beatings of civilians by Russian servicemen in Chechnya in reports that put her on a collision course with the authorities but won her numerous international awards.

“People sometimes pay with their lives for saying out loud what they think. People can even get killed just for giving me information,” Reporters Without Borders quoted her as saying at a press freedom conference in Vienna in December.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States was shocked and profoundly saddened by the slaying of a journalist who devoted much of her career to “shining a light on human rights abuses and other atrocities of the war in Chechnya” and the plight of Chechen refugees.

“The United States urges the Russian government to conduct an immediate and thorough investigation in order to find, prosecute and bring to justice all those responsible for this heinous murder,” McCormack said in a statement.