(AFP)- - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Tuesday that the world is watching Russia's progress in investigating the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

"I would hope that the Russian government understands that everybody is watching, that an investigation of this event is absolutely necessary," she said.

"She was the embodiment of what a free press meant in Russia."

Politkovskaya, 48, a prominent Kremlin critic who investigated corruption and human rights abuses by Russian forces in Chechnya, was gunned down on Saturday in what police said was a professional hit as she stepped from the lift of her apartment building in Moscow.

Speaking at a news conference in the east German city of Dresden on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the murder an "appalling" crime "that cannot go unpunished".

Rice said that the international community will pay close attention to how much Russian investigators actually do to solve both Politkovskaya's murder and those of other journalists killed in recent years.

"The Russian Government does have a heavy burden to demonstrate that it is both interested in and determined to find the killers of these journalists," she said. "There have been too many of these and there have been too many that have been unsolved."