Editor who unmasked super-rich of Russia is shot dead in Moscow

The man who told the world exactly how wealthy Russia's super-rich are and exactly what oligarchs spend their millions on has been shot dead in Moscow in a murder that has all the hallmarks of a contract killing. Pavel Klebnikov, the chief editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was shot at point- blank range in a suburb of northern Moscow near the city's botanical gardens at around 10pm last night. He died later in an ambulance having taken four bullets in the chest. Klebnikov, 41, a US citizen born in New York, was descended from White Russian émigrés who fled the country when Communists seized power. He had made powerful enemies writing a damning book about Boris Berezovsky, the tycoon who has exiled himself in the UK, and another about a Chechen rebel field commander called Khoj-Akhmed Nukaev. Klebnikov alleged that Mr Berezovsky, with $620m (£330m) to his name, was involved in the criminal underworld and became embroiled in a protracted court case that ended in an out-of-court settlement and an apology from Forbes. Some said that his book about Mr Berezovsky - Godfather of the Kremlin; The Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism - was anti-Semitic in tone and overly critical of the tycoon at the expense of other key characters such as Russia's former president Boris Yeltsin.