RUSSIA: A high-level row has broken out among Russian security officials over the arrest this week of two Chechens suspected of the assassination last summer of an American magazine editor, Paul Klebnikov.
Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was killed in a hail of bullets fired from a black sedan in a Moscow street in July.
His killing sent shock waves through the expatriate community which had thought the country had left the 1990s era of "gangster capitalism" behind.
On Tuesday Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin announced that a gun recovered from the Chechens, arrested in an unrelated kidnapping case, matched bullets found in Klebnikov's body.
But the Prosecutor General's office has now criticised the move, saying the public announcement could wreck ongoing investigations and labelled Mr Pronin's actions "unacceptable".
The row comes with tensions high between the capital's police and prosecutors, after prosecution officials announced they would investigate the death of a terror suspect last week when he was taken into police custody.
Police arrested the man, whose identity remains unclear, while he was driving in central Moscow with two land mines and a pack of TNT in his car boot last week. Three hours after being taken into police custody, the man was rushed to hospital and died of serious head wounds.
Meanwhile, doubts have emerged about the likelihood of the Chechen kidnappers possessing the Klebnikov murder weapon. Normal practice in Russian contract killings, which some officials say are now at record levels, is to dispose of the weapon shortly after the murder.
The problem thus far for prosecutors in the Klebnikov case is that he had offended some of the country's most powerful tycoons.
As Forbes editor he took a step deemed unwise by seasoned journalists by publishing the Russian equivalent of the American parent magazines Rich List, naming 100 of the richest Russians, some of whom were thought to be angry at having their wealth made public.
Klebnikov, of Russian extraction, had moved to Moscow from the United States this year, proclaiming in an editorial the month before he was shot that the country had turned away from the era of "gangster-capitalism of the 1990s".
Meanwhile, the commander-in-chief of the nation's land forces, GenNikolai Kormiltsev, tendered his resignation yesterday, with no reasons given.
Speculation in Moscow is that he has been forced out for the army's failure to prevent the Beslan massacre or to subdue Chechen rebel forces five years after the war first broke out.
All of this is scant comfort to a nation still jittery after a month of terror attacks that have seen school children massacred, two airliners brought down and bombs on the streets of Moscow.
Yesterday TV stations went on alert, claiming they had been warned by intelligence agencies of a terrorist plan to seize a broadcasting station and broadcast their demands.