Russian transport minister found dead after being sacked by Putin
Moscow
The Russian transport minister recently sacked by President Vladimir Putin, Roman Starovoit, has been found dead with a gunshot wound in a car, the central investigative committee in Moscow reported on Monday.
'The circumstances of the incident are currently being investigated.
The main theory is suicide,' the spokeswoman for the investigative authority, Svetlana Petrenko, said, adding that the body of the 53-year-old was found in his private car.
However, the Kremlin-affiliated Telegram channel Shot, with more than 1 million subscribers, showed videos early in the evening of investigators not pulling Starovoit's body from the car but carrying it from a bush.
A Tesla, which the minister is said to have driven privately, can also be seen. His assistant is also visible in the videos; she is said to have been his lover and identified the family man.
Russian media had earlier reported that the politician shot himself at his residence in Odintsovo in the Moscow region. The pistol was said to have been lying next to him.
Several bloggers doubted the official version given by the investigative committee and suggested that the case raises many questions.
There was initially no official confirmation for various reports that the minister is said to have taken his own life over the weekend while still in office. Several media outlets also reported another mysterious death in the Ministry of Transport on Monday. A high-ranking official, frequently named and said to be aged 42, is reported to have died there during a meeting.
The talk is of cardiac arrest, although there was initially no official confirmation of this.
Commentators in political Telegram channels speculated that Starovoit might have been shot or driven to suicide as part of power plays.
In the decree published in Moscow earlier on Monday, Putin did not give any reasons why Starovoit, the former governor of the western Russian region of Kursk, who was appointed as transport minister in May last year, was leaving his post.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also did not provide a reason. The occasionally used phrase 'loss of trust' was missing from the decree, Peskov confirmed.
Starovoit's deputy, Andrey Nikitin, has been appointed acting transport minister.
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