Enver Ziganshin, first deputy general director and chief engineer of Rusia Petroleum, died of one or several gunshots to his head at his country house on Saturday, a duty officer at the Irkutsk regional police headquarters said.
A Rusia Petroleum official said the killing would not affect work at the field, which has come under pressure from state officials and prosecutors in recent weeks.
Officials at the Irkutsk office of TNK-BP, which owns 63 percent of Rusia Petroleum, said Ziganshin had received two bullets in the back and one in the head, Interfax reported. The attackers fled, the officials said.
Ziganshin was shot in a banya, said an internet report by Irkutsk's state-run television. His wife found him and took him to a nearby hospital, but he died on the way, the report said.
Local prosecutors are investigating the killing, focusing on the theory that it was a contract hit, the TNK-BP office said.
Kovykta is an $18 billion project that has reserves of 2 trillion cubic meters of gas to feed domestic users and Asian markets, including China.
The killing will not affect the Kovykta development, said Andrei Dovgan, Rusia Petroleum deputy general director. "I don't think it will reflect on the implementation of the project, although of course the loss for the company is very serious," he said from his Moscow office. "He was the chief engineer. It was the position on which everything else depended."
But Konstantin Batunin, an oil analyst at Alfa Bank, said the killing could further hinder the field's development and complicate relations with the government.
TNK-BP spokeswoman Marina Dracheva said the firm was aware of the killing. She declined further comment.
Rusia Petroleum general director Valery Pak received an official warning on Sept. 25 over purported operational and environmental violations at Kovykta, the Prosecutor General's Office said in a statement.
Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev said the following day that the ministry planned to review Rusia Petroleum's compliance with its license to the Kovykta field and with environmental laws.
The license requires that the company supply 9 billion cubic meters of gas to the local market starting this year, but it is unlikely to do so, Trutnev said. Earlier this year, TNK-BP asked the ministry to delay the start of full production to 2009.
The company has previously faced threats that the government will revoke Kovykta drilling licenses unless it coordinates the field's development with Gazprom.
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