Russian Murders Spark Memories Of 1990s Chaos
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MOSCOW — Fears were mounting yesterday that Russia was returning to the chaos that characterized the 1990s after police confirmed the shooting of a Moscow banker outside his home was at least the fourth contract killing in under a month. A senior official at Russia’s second largest bank, Alexander Plokhin, was shot dead as he stepped out of a lift in his block of flats late on Tuesday night.
“The attacker was waiting for his victim on the staircase,” a spokesman for the Moscow prosecutor’s office said. “When he came out of the lift, the killer shot him in the head. The murder has the tell-tale signs of a contract killing.”
Mr. Plokhin, 58, ran one of Vneshtorgbank’s main branches in Moscow and was also a senior official at its division dealing with consumer banking and credit. He had tried to reform the banking sector by closing down banks accused of money laundering. His murder comes less than a month after the two highest-profile assassinations in Russia since President Putin came to power.
Unlike crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya and Andrei Kozlov, the liberalizing deputy chairman of Russia’s central bank, who were both probably killed for political reasons, Mr. Plokhin, an unknown, is more likely to have fallen foul of Russia’s criminal godfathers. The chief engineer at a BP subsidiary, Enver Ziganshin, was also shot over the weekend.
“The increase in the frequency of killings reflects the growing criminalization of the ruling elite’s mentality,” a leading Kremlinologist, Stanislav Belkovsky, said. “In the 1990s, the criminal world and the political elite were separate,” he said. “Now they have merged.”