Spain Detains 2 in Governor’s Killing
By Nabi Abdullaev
Staff Writer
The Moscow Times, Russia
July 13 2006
Spanish police have detained two men suspected of killing Magadan
Governor Valentin Tsvetkov in 2002. Alexander Zakharov, a native of
the Far Eastern Primorye region, and Martin Babakehyan, a native of
Armenia, were arrested at the seaside resort of Marbella on July 7,
Spanish police announced Wednesday.
Zakharov, 36, and Babakehyan, 35, are the prime suspects in the murder
of Tsvetkov, who was gunned down in broad daylight on Moscow’s busy
Novy Arbat in October 2002. They were placed on Interpol’s wanted
list in 2003 at the request of the Moscow police.
Russian authorities said Wednesday that they would send an extradition
request to Spanish authorities in the next few days.
Spanish police said the two suspects were carrying fake passports at
the time of their arrest, although their real passports were discovered
during a raid of their homes, The Associated Press reported.
Zakharov and Babakehyan will soon be transferred to Madrid, where
they will appear before a judge.
Tsvetkov, governor of the gold-rich Magadan region in the Far East,
was shot in the head with a pistol around 9 a.m. as he was walking
to his office in central Moscow. It was the first assassination of a
governor in post-Soviet Russia. President Vladimir Putin called the
murder a "crime against the state."
The first suspect in Tsvetkov’s murder, Artur Anisimov, was arrested
in July 2003. Anisimov was convicted the following year on an unrelated
fraud charge and sentenced to three years in prison. The murder charge
against him has not been dropped, however.
Moscow police proceeded to issue international warrants for another
five suspects in 2003, a police spokesman said Wednesday.
The second suspect, Azeri native Masis Ahunts, was arrested in
Vladivostok in December 2004. He remains in detention awaiting trial.
With the arrest of Zakharov and Babakehyan, only two of the six
suspects now remain at large. A spokesman for the Prosecutor General’s
Office declined to name the two outstanding suspects pending the
outcome of an ongoing investigation. But the list released by Moscow
police contains the suspects’ names: Yury Rashkin and Konstantin
Korshunov.
In 2003, then-Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov, who oversaw the
investigation, said that the murder was related to Tsvetkov’s
distribution of fishing quotas among competing companies in the
region. Investigators have also suggested that the murder might have
resulted from Tsvetkov’s attempts to force gold-mining companies
in the region to repay a multimillion-dollar loan provided by the
federal government in 1995.
Although the names of the men who pulled the trigger in the Tsvetkov
case were released to the press a few months after the investigation
began and were subsequently confirmed on numerous occasions by law
enforcement officials, the identity of the person who ordered the
hit has never been made public.