A former army officer who tortured and killed a young woman in one of the most notorious crimes of the Kremlin's "dirty war" in Chechnya, was murdered in Moscow.
Yuri Budanov, 47, a former tank commander – lauded by Russian nationalists, but reviled in Chechnya – was shot four times in the head by bullets fired from a silenced pistol. His body could be seen slumped on a pathway next to a playground.
The attacker had apparently waited in a white Mitsubishi Lancer, which was driven by an accomplice and later found abandoned on a nearby street.
Budanov, 47, was jailed for 10 years in 2003 for the kidnapping and killing three years earlier of Elza Kungayeva, 18, in 2000, but was controversially released on parole in 2009.
Suspicion is likely to point to Chechnya, the Muslim region in southern Russia where two wars raged in the 1990s and early 2000s after separatists clashed with federal forces.
Budanov was the most notorious of a handful of officers to face justice for Moscow's campaign of terror. The ill-disciplined military was responsible for numerous rapes, beatings and extra-judicial executions of civilians during the two campaigns.
However, in an interview with Russian media Visa Kungayev, Elza's father, who now lives with his family in Norway, said Budanov's death was not connected to his family's tragedy. "A dog dies a dog's death," he said.
Kungayev said Chechen tradition dictated that if anyone were to take revenge it should have been him. "I'm a strictly law-abiding person… if I didn't respect the law then I would have gone and killed himself," he said. "But I didn't want that. That's why I moved to Norway, to get away from that."
A spokesman for investigators said that all avenues of inquiry were open. Witnesses had suggested the driver of the killer's car had Slavic features, he said. One reputable website quoted a friend of Budanov saying he had spoken of being followed in the last three months.
Budanov, a colonel in a tank regiment, abducted Kungayeva in March 2000, after spending a drunken evening celebrating his daughter's birthday. He and his soldiers drove an armoured personnel carrier into the garden of her family's home in the village of Tangi Chu, stormed into the house and dragged her off.
Budanov took Kungayeva to his quarters in a railway carriage where he put on loud rock music. He then tortured the teenager – soldiers nearby heard muffled screams — before strangling her and ordering his subordinates to bury her naked corpse in a shallow grave.
He was arrested two days later but acquitted of murder on grounds of temporary insanity in 2002,after claiming he thought Kungayeva was a sniper and saying he killed her in a fit of rage during interrogation. A rape charge was dropped.
Russia's supreme court ordered a new trial and Budanov was found guilty.
Budanov's relatively lenient sentence of 10 years caused disgust among a vocal minority in Russia. By comparison, Mikhail Khodorkovksky, the oil tycoon, was given eight years behind bars on fraud charges in 2005, and 14 years in a recent second trial for embezzlement.
A tale of depravity
It was winter 2002 and Chechen refugees were living in a field of petrified mud in the Russian republic of Ingushetia.
For the Kungayev family, as for countless others all around them, home was a single, mouldering canvas tent with a fringe of icicles hanging from the makeshift porch.
Tens of thousands of civilians had fled to such camps after the Russian army swept into Chechnya, a few miles to the east, two years earlier. Many told tales of horror about the invasion: brothers detained and submitted to electric shocks; sons whisked from their beds and never seen again.
BBut Visa Kungayev's story exceeded them all in sheer depravity. Inside his tent I met him and his wife, Roza, sitting on a bench under a single flickering bulb.
Visa pulled out a shiny black folio. "Here is my girl after they dug up her body," he said, showing a photograph of the battered face of a dead teenager, a sheet drawn to her neck.
The teenage Elza — known in the family as Kheda – had been kidnapped in spring 2000 by the Russian tank commander, . His name was Yury Budanov.
In the picture, Elza'sher face and chest were pockmarked. "That's where he ground out his cigarettes on her skin," said Visa.
Budanov was then on trial in Rostov-on-Don, and despite death threats, Visa and Roza were pushing for his conviction. "Every day I relive the night when my eldest daughter was raped and murdered."