Killers of Russian minister arrested

The committee said in a statement that five people had been arrested for carrying out the June 5, 2009 attack.

MOSCOW, February 24, 2010 (AFP) - Authorities have arrested the killers of a top official in Russia's volatile North Caucasus who was shot dead by a sniper as he was leaving a wedding last year, investigators said Wednesday.

Investigators "have identified and arrested the organizer, the executor and accomplices in the murder of Dagestan interior minister Adilgerei Magomedtagirov," Russia's investigative committee said.

The committee said in a statement that five people had been arrested for carrying out the June 5, 2009 attack, in which the head of the Dagestani interior ministry's logistics department was also killed.

The high-profile assassination last summer drew attention to rising violence in Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region sandwiched between war-torn Chechnya and the Caspian Sea.

Magomedtagirov, the region's long-serving interior minister, had been a tough-talking general who frequently appeared on television to comment on Dagestan's latest upheavals.

Before his death he had been targeted in at least three previous attacks, including a 2005 suicide bombing.

Investigators did not identify the suspects or their motives. Dagestan is troubled by an Islamist insurgency and chronic political feuding between its numerous ethnic groups, as well as rampant crime and corruption.

This month the Kremlin appointed a new regional leader, Magomedsalam Magomedov, after the former president of Dagestan, Mukhu Aliyev, failed to stop the region's slide into violence.