Special Unit to Probe 'Rich List' Murder

[China]

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,10123995^401,00.html

Special unit to probe 'rich list' murder

By Jim Heintz in Moscow (The Associated Press)

July 13, 2004

A HIGH-LEVEL special crimes unit will investigate the killing of the American editor of Forbes magazine's Russian edition, an official said overnight, a sign the government wants to show its determination to solve the slaying.

Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov has ordered his office's department for the investigation of particularly important cases to conduct the probe into the death of Paul Klebnikov, said Viktor Potapov, an official at the prosecutor general's office.

Mr Klebnikov, 41, was gunned down late Friday outside the magazine's Moscow offices in a slaying widely believed to be connected to his work.

Forbes started its Russian-language edition in April, and in May attracted wide attention by publishing a list of Russia's wealthiest people - a sensitive topic in a country where many fortunes were made through dubious activities in the corruption-marred years following the Soviet collapse.

"It is absolutely obvious that the motive of the tragedy was his professional activity, something he did with the ratings of the richest people in Russia," the Interfax news agency quoted Russian Union of Journalists secretary Igor Yakovenko as saying.

"The people who became billionaires in months and who cannot explain where they had gotten this money, either to the world or to law-enforcement agencies, cannot stand such reports," Mr Yakovenko said, according to Interfax.

Mr Klebnikov, born in the United States of Russian heritage, also authored a book about Boris Berezovsky, one of the tycoons who got rich in the chaotic and violent period of 1990s post-Soviet capitalism.

In the course of writing about Mr Berezovsky, Mr Klebnikov interviewed Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, a former deputy prime minister in the Chechen separatist government who was rumoured to have provided criminal help to Mr Berezovsky.

Mr Klebnikov last year published a book in Russian based on his interviews with Mr Nukhayev, Conversations With a Barbarian. Some newspapers on Monday suggested that book could have provoked the killing.

"Up to the moment the book appeared on the shelves, Nukhayev didn't even suspect it was being prepared," the newspaper Vremya Novostei wrote.

Also overnight, the newspaper Kommersant cited Mikhail Fishman, a journalist for the Russian edition of Newsweek who accompanied the mortally wounded Mr Klebnikov to the hospital, as saying that he was told by a doctor that Mr Klebnikov died while the elevator taking him to surgery was stuck.

The international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders has said it was "shocked" by the killing and called on the Government to protect journalists. It said that five journalists were killed last year in Russia, and that official investigations have so far failed to uncover why they died.

The car from which the shots were fired was found by police on Saturday, Russian news reports said.

A US Embassy spokesman said the FBI's attache in Moscow has offered assistance to Russian authorities in investigating the killing, but declined to give details.

Mr Klebnikov was able to speak after he was shot but couldn't say anything about what could have been the cause of the attack, according to Alexander Gordeyev, an editor of another magazine who came to Klebnikov's side as he lay outside the building.