Russian minister sacked by Putin found dead in car with gunshot wound

A Russian minister has been found dead in his car outside Moscow with an apparent ‘self-inflicted’ gunshot wound hours after being sacked by Vladimir Putin.

Roman Starovoit, 53, was sacked after barely a year as transport minister without an official explanation on Monday.

But political analysts raised the possibility that he may have been dismissed in connection with an investigation into corruption in the region he once ran.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, the top criminal investigation agency, said the body of Starovoit was found with a gunshot wound in his car parked in Odintsovo, a neighbourhood just west of the capital where many members of Russia’s elite live.

A gun previously presented to him as an official gift was reportedly found next to his body.

A criminal probe was launched into the death, and investigators saw suicide as the most likely cause, according to committee’s spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko, who did not say when Starovoit died.

Starovoit was last seen in public Sunday morning, when an official video from the ministry’s situation room featured him receiving reports from officials.

Russian media reported that Starovoit’s dismissal could have been linked to an investigation into the embezzlement of state funds allocated for building fortifications in the Kursk region, where he served as governor before becoming transportation minister.

The death came days after an oil tycoon who had links to the KGB became the latest high profile figure to mysteriously fall from a high building in Russia.

Transneft vice-president Andrey Badalov, 62, is said to have fallen from the penthouse of the luxury high rise where in lived in Moscow.

‘Badalov’s body was found under the windows of an [apartment building] on Rublevskoye Highway,’ a source told TASS.

Transneft is Russia’s state oil pipeline monopoly which is run by former KGB spy, Nikolai Tokarev, 74,  who served with Vladimir Putin, 72,  in Germany in the Cold War.