- MOSCOW (Reuters) - The governor
of a gold-rich Russian region was shot dead on Friday by a contract killer
at morning rush hour on a bustling Moscow street not far from the Kremlin,
police said. Valentin Tsvetkov, governor of the Magadan region in the far
east, was gunned down on Moscow's Novy Arbat, a busy thoroughfare of casinos,
bars and expensive fashion shops and the route to work for the elite being
driven into the Kremlin.
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- The brazen killing, on one of Moscow's most heavily-policed
streets, was the first major political assassination since President Vladimir
Putin took office in May 2000 and a direct affront to his tough crime-fighting
policies.
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- Police said the killer had hidden in wait behind a billboard
and shot Tsvetkov in the head with a pistol, equipped with a silencer,
as he emerged from buildings near the Magadan regional headquarters in
the capital, Russian television said.
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- Police said the killer also tried to shoot Magadan's
vice-governor, who was with Tsvetkov, but missed.
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- Putin, seeking badly needed foreign investment, has worked
hard to rid Russia of the gangland image it built up during the wild, post-Soviet
years of his predecessor Boris Yeltsin and has set law and order as a priority.
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- Signaling his concern, Putin immediately ordered Russia's
Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov and Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov
to handle the investigation personally. A Kremlin spokesman said Putin
sent his condolences to Tsvetkov's widow.
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- SPRAWLED ON HIS BACK
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- Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin told reporters at
the scene that the killing appeared linked to Tsvetkov's work in Magadan.
His body lay sprawled on the street for an hour and a half after the shooting
as detectives checked the area.
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- Tsvetkov, 54, had been governor since 1996 in the Pacific
region, seven times zones east of Moscow and once notorious for Stalin-era
gulag labor camps. He had been, at different times, a member of both the
upper and lower houses of parliament.
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- "According to our preliminary investigations, the
contract killer shot him and the main version is that the murder was connected
to his professional work," Pronin said.
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- The gunman jumped into a waiting car and sped off, according
to eyewitnesses quoted by Itar-Tass news agency. Police later circulated
a description of the suspected killer.
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- The Novy Arbat avenue, where the killing took place,
is heavily-policed since it is the main route to the Kremlin taken daily
by Putin's armed motorcade and other senior officials.
-
- The 89 governors in the Russian Federation enjoy huge
powers in their fiefdoms though Putin has tried to clip their wings.
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- Last August the leader of a small opposition party founded
by exiled businessman Boris Berezovsky was shot dead near his home. But
under Putin, a former KGB agent, political killings have been a rarity
in contrast to the Yeltsin period when there were several high-profile
murders.
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- They included that of liberal member of parliament Galina
Starovoitova, shot dead in 1998, and popular television journalist Vladislav
Listyev in 1995. The motives and culprits in those killings were never
established.
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- Local politicians and businessmen remain targets of contract
killers in Russia's vast outer regions with regular attacks usually linked
to business and commercial interests.
-
- (Additional reporting by Oliver Bullough)
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-
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