A senior Dagestan official who survived three assassination attempts at home has been shot dead by gunmen in southwestern Moscow, investigators said Monday.
One suspect, a 32-year-old Dagestani resident, was detained while apparently driving a getaway car.
Two gunmen fired at least 20 rounds at Alim-Sultan Alkhmatov, head of Dagestan's Khasavyurt district, from automatic rifles as he and two bodyguards got out of a car at about 8:15 p.m. Sunday at 21/1 Novocheryomushkinskaya Ulitsa, the Investigative Committee said.
One bodyguard was wounded in the attack.
Alkhmatov, 44, died from his injuries while being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
"The actions of the group of criminals were very well-planned," Anatoly
Bagmet, chief of the Moscow branch of the Investigative Committee, said in remarks from the crime scene broadcast on Vesti-24 state television.
According to a preliminary investigation, the two gunmen approached
Alkhmatov with guns blazing while a third man waited for them in a car.
The gunmen fled the scene in two cars, a Mercedes S 350 and a Mitsubishi Pajero.
Police stopped the Mercedes at the intersection of Nakhimovsky Prospekt and Profsoyuznaya Ulitsa and detained the driver, Khabir Budaikhanov, the
Investigative Committee said in a statement.
Investigators later found the Mitsubishi Pajero abandoned near the crime scene.
The police found six automatic weapons in the cars and near the crime scene, including Kalashnikov and Kedr rifles.
In what investigators said might be a related attack, unknown gunmen shot dead a senior police officer in a Dagestani village in a district neighboring the one where Alkhmatov worked. The gunmen killed Alim-Sultan Atuyev, the deputy chief of criminal investigations for Dagestan's police force, and wounded Abdula Magomedgaziyev, a relative of Atuyev who served in the same police department, in the attack at about 7 p.m. in Stariye Miatli, the Investigative Committee said.
A police source told Itar-Tass that the Stariye Miatli and Moscow killings might be linked. "That version is being investigated," the police source said. "In both cases, the murders were carried out by professional killers."
North Caucasus-related killings are not rare in Moscow, although Dagestani officials are usually targeted inside the region, not in the Russian capital.
A security analyst said the Moscow attack did not appear to have been carried out by professional killers, no matter what investigators might say.
"The intricacies of the Moscow attack show that it wasn't conducted by professionals but just by people used to [killing]," said Andrei Soldatov, an analyst with the Agentura think tank.
"It looks like those people carried out the attack on an emotional basis," he said, pointing out that a suspect had been detained and the guns, which are not easy to acquire in Dagestan, were left at the scene.
It wasn't clear Monday why the gunmen attacked in Moscow rather than in Dagestan, where many local officials have been killed in escalating violence this year. In one of those attacks, Dagestani Interior Minister Adilgirei Magomedtagirov was killed in Makhachkala in June.