AT least four men were cut down in a storm of bullets as a wave of contract killings washed over the Russian capital last week, raising fears that Moscow is reverting to the lawlessness of the 1990s.

The murders have raised fears that Chechen death squads are operating in the Russian capital. They have also undermined President Dmitry Medvedev's promise to restore the rule of law. Some of the killings were clearly commercially motivated; others appeared political.

The killings on January 19 of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, 34, and trainee journalist Anastasia Baburova, 25, are the most high profile and shocking. The pair were murdered in broad daylight on a street less than a mile from the Kremlin by a masked gunman using a pistol fitted with a silencer.

Markelov took on many powerful government and criminal interests in the courtroom. Baburova wrote about Russia's increasingly violent neo-Nazi movement. Like so many other contract killings, nobody has been arrested.

The killings have now caught the attention of politicians outside Russia. European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso spoke of the murders at a news conference in Moscow last Friday, much to prime minister Vladimir Putin's anger. Putin has said nothing publicly about the double murder.

But last week was a particularly bloody week in Moscow, evoking the 1990s, a decade when businessmen regularly took out contracts on rivals. On Thursday, Gilani Shepiyev, 36, a former deputy mayor of the Chechen capital Grozny, was shot three times in the head outside his home. An hour earlier, a man said to be his bodyguard was shot dead while walking his dog. Another Chechen, Tamerlan Akhmatov, was shot twice in the chest in a courtyard. He too died.

Separately, a well-known criminal kingpin from southern Russia, Alik Minalyan, was machine-gunned down as he got out of his Mercedes.

The spike in murders appears to be a side-effect of the economic crisis that has hit Russia hard. The result, analysts say, has been increased lawlessness. But many of the murders appear to have a Chechen connection, raising questions about the Kremlin's control of one of the country's most volatile regions.

Liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta has published eyewitness testimony of a disturbing incident in Moscow that appears to confirm that Chechen hit squads are roaming the Russian capital. Armed with Stechkin pistols and police or FSB security service identification passes, the Chechens appear to operate with impunity.

A Moscow bus driver told the paper he was badly beaten by two Chechen policemen. They dragged him from the bus and beat him in the middle of the street in front of his passengers, he said. The driver managed to fight them off with a crowbar but was later hospitalised.

In 2006, Movladi Baisarov, a former Chechen warlord and FSB security service commander, was shot dead during the rush hour in central Moscow. That same year, investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who often wrote about Chechnya, was shot dead in her Moscow apartment block. Last September, the powerful Chechen politician Ruslan Yamadayev was murdered in his car.

People who used to work with Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed president of Chechnya, say he has a list of 300 people he wants dead. Kadyrov's aides say such allegations are part of a campaign to blacken his name.

On January 13, Umar Israilov, 27, was shot dead in Vienna. A former bodyguard for Kadyrov, he had fled to Austria and had filed a case at the European Court of Human Rights against Kadyrov. His filing alleged he saw Kadyrov torture, order opponents' murder, and more. Austrian police have arrested a group of Chechen refugees in connection with his murder.

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