MOSCOW – A judge on Monday handed down sentences ranging from 12 years to life in prison to five men convicted in the shooting death of Russia’s most prominent crusading journalist.

The sentencing, however, did little to assuage the family and supporters of Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down as she was getting into the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow on Oct. 7, 2006. The men convicted in the case were contract killers, and no one has been charged with hiring them.

“I don’t feel satisfaction, I don’t feel a thing,” Ilya Politkovsky, the slain journalist’s son, said in an interview. “We will never consider the case closed unless the person or persons who ordered her killed are found and tried in court.”

Politkovskaya, 48, who earned fame and the government’s enmity for her reporting on President Vladimir Putin and the Russian war in Chechnya, was shot twice in the body and once in the head as she entered the elevator with her hands full of shopping bags.

More than seven years and two trials later, four men from Chechnya and a former organized crime police officer were sentenced following their convictions in the case last month.

As the prisoners smiled from inside a bulletproof glass cage in a Moscow courtroom, Judge Pavel Melyokhin read a verdict saying that Politkovskaya was killed for her work “exposing human rights violations, embezzlement and abuse of power.”

He handed down life sentences to the man convicted of organizing the murder, Lom-Ali Gaytukayev, and to his nephew, Rustam Makhmudov, who pulled the trigger.

The three others received 12 to 20 years.

All five were convicted by a jury last month.

Politkovskaya, the daughter of a Soviet diplomat, was born in New York and held joint U.S. and Russian citizenship. She had been among the most vocal critics of Putin and his policies in restive Chechnya.

Shortly after she was killed, Putin dissociated the Kremlin of any involvement in the crime, saying her “death in itself is more damaging to the current authorities both in Russia and Chechen Republic … than her activities.” Russia’s prosecutor general personally oversaw the investigation.