Return of the contract killer claims ex-KGB chief

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April 17, 2005

Sunday Times
Mark Franchetti, Moscow



AT FIRST neighbours mistook the shots for firecrackers. Then the quiet Moscow street was filled with a child’s screams. When people rushed out they were confronted by a heartbreaking scene: Tatyana, 4, stood crying by her parents who lay in a pool of blood.

Colonel-General Anatoly Trofimov, her father, had been shot in the head and the chest by a masked gunman and died instantly. Her mother, Tatyana Kopytseva, 28, had been hit in the head as she tried to flee and was mortally wounded.

The double hit was extraordinary even by the standards of a country where contract killings have often been used to settle scores. Trofimov, 64, was a former chief of the Moscow branch of the FSB — the successor to the KGB — and his shooting was the highest-profile murder of someone from the security services.

The cold-blooded execution has shattered the illusion that Russia under President Vladimir Putin has turned its back on the lawlessness of the mid- 1990s, when such violence was commonplace.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1572295,00.html