ST. PETERSBURG -- Thousands of police officers have swept through this city in recent days, detaining 25 people for questioning in connection with the murder of liberal State Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova.
Sergei Stepashin, the nation's top police officer, said the investigation would have special legal status and was already working on strong leads.
Stepashin said Tuesday that he had signed a joint decree with Prosecutor General Yury Skuratov and Federal Security Service chief Vladimir Putin to give investigators into Starovoitova's death unusual authority to conduct their work independently, Interfax reported.
The interior minister also met with Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov to discuss extraordinary funding for the investigation - in particular, for a series of "unique experiments." Neither Stepashin nor any other law enforcement official would elaborate on that tantalizingly cryptic comment.
Primakov on Tuesday also spoke out, promising a nationwide crackdown to halt "the upsurge in crime."
A day earlier, Primakov met with Stepashin, Skuratov and Putin to discuss urgent measures to reduce crime. Stepashin said the government would soon introduce legislation to ensure "a sharp reduction in the number of private security companies, a radical cut in the weapons trade" and a harsh 15-year prison sentence for the illegal possession of weapons or explosives.
"The country is oversaturated with weapons," Interfax quoted Stepashin as saying. He also reported on a police sweep of St. Petersburg on Sunday night in which some 4,000 officers participated and 25 people were detained for questioning.
Igor Kozhevnikov, an Interior Ministry officer who is leading the investigative work into Starovoitova's murder, was quoted by Interfax as saying Tuesday that his team had collected useful clues for tracking down the killers and had "outlined the main possible motives of the crime."
"I am certain that the murder of Starovoitova will be solved, but for this time is needed," he said. He agreed with the general consensus that it was most likely a political assassination.
Starovoitova had many political enemies, but it is difficult to see who would gain anything from having her killed. Police say a man and a woman acting together, and probably with additional accomplices, shot Starovoitova three times in the head as she walked up the stairs of her apartment building.
Her aide Ruslan Linkov, 27, was also shot once in the head and once in the neck, but Tuesday had recovered enough to testify to investigators. Starovoitova was witheringly critical of the Communist Party, and her ally Yegor Gaidar, a former acting prime minister, has suggested left-wing radicals - or even mainstream party members - arranged her murder.
"Galina Vasilyevna was regularly listed in the communist press as an enemy of the people," Gaidar said.
Starovoitova, who is popular in St. Petersburg, had also crossed the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, by announcing she would run for governor of the Leningrad region against the party's leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
And she had crossed Vladimir Yakovlev, the governor of St. Petersburg, who was fighting to put his own candidates into the city's legislature. Elections are scheduled for Dec. 6. Starovoitova had been organizing an alternative slate of candidates, but it was tough going.
"I know that Galina Starovoitova was trying to unite St. Petersburg's democrats and that she supported a group of candidates who were facing opposition from criminal elements," said Anatoly Chubais, a leading liberal politician and the architect of Russia's privatization program.
However, if the motive behind her killing was to weaken her forces in the run-up to the St. Petersburg elections, that has backfired, as St. Petersburg democrats are now uniting their forces in her name.