RUSSIA: Moscow police were hunting the killers of the American editor of Forbes magazine's Russian edition yesterday after he was shot dead outside his office in an apparent contract killing, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Moscow
Friends and colleagues of Mr Paul Khlebnikov, who was shot 10 times on Friday night by unknown assailants, also held a small memorial service for him yesterday, ahead of burial in the United States.
Russia's Prosecutor General Mr Vladimir Ustinov has taken personal control of the investigation into the murder of a man who gained a reputation for delving into the murky histories of the country's billionaire "oligarchs".
"I can offer no realistic version of why this happened. Paul was an investigative journalist. He did this for 17 years and probably had plenty of enemies," said Mr Leonid Bershidsky, publisher of Forbes and Newsweek in Russia.
Mr Khlebnikov, who was shot several times by two different guns, came to Russia from New York this year, to launch Forbes' Russian-language edition in April.
In May, the magazine attracted wide attention by publishing a list of Russia's wealthiest people, claiming that Moscow was home to more billionaires than any other city in the world.
Mr Khlebnikov (41) rose to prominence with a controversial book about Mr Boris Berezovsky, a tycoon who amassed a fortune in the 1990s, when corruption and violence dominated Russia's transition from communism to capitalism.
Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders urged the Russian government to do more to protect journalists. It said five reporters were killed in 2003, and the assailants had not been found.