13 mourners die in blast as privileged group fights faction war

MIKHAIL LIKHODEI'S face, engraved on his tombstone in the Russian tradition, looked out over a scene of devastation at Moscow's Kotlyakovskoye cemetery yesterday. A lock of his hair hung askew, as though disturbed by the bomb blast that killed 13 of those who had come to remember him.

Mutilated bodies were strewn all around. One, apparently that of a man, landed on top of a railed off grave 30 yards away, a single brown shoe lay in the withering autumn grass.

Yesterday, on the second anniversary of Likhodei's violent death, his friends and relatives had gathered to mark the occasion, to drink vodka, eat snacks and recount episodes from his life. The 6 lb TNT bomb caused the biggest single death toll in Moscow's gang warfare, which began shortly after dissolution of the USSR five years ago.

Likhodei had been president of the Afghan Veterans' Foundation, which had tax exemptions on the import of alcohol and tobacco. Like other organisations with privileges it had become wealthy enough to fight over.

The organisation split into competing branches and Likhodei, whose name means "evil deed", was shot dead outside his apartment, the first major victim of the feud.

The leader of the rival group, Valery Radchikov, was badly wounded in an assault recently and Likhodei's successor, Sergei Trakhirov along with his wife, were among those who died yesterday.

Col Svyatoslav Zhorin, a grizzled former KGB officer who now works with the Federal Security Service, put the massacre down to a "settling of scores" between the rival branches of the organisation.

Another, much richer, grouping with tax exemptions on cigarettes and alcohol has been involved in the continuing scandals surrounding Mr Yeltsin's administration. The National Sports Foundation was reputed to be earning hundreds of millions of dollars each month, with some it destined for Mr Yeltsin's re-election campaign. Its director, Mr Boris Fyodorov, survived an assassination attempt earlier this year and has been accusing some of president's former associates of gross corruption.

In 10 months Moscow police have arrested 500 people on their wanted lists, crushed 115 criminal gangs and seized more than half a million weapons, according to the Interior Minister Gen Anatoly Kulikov. There have been 1,238 murders in Moscow this year, not including yesterday's toll. This represented a 14 per cent fall on the same period last year, but there had been a noticeable increase in murders of a ferociously sadistic nature, the minister said.

Last weekend western entrepreneurs received a highly unwelcome warning when a leading US businessman, Paul Tatum, was riddled with machine gun fire at the Kievskaya metro station, near the plush Slavyanskaya hotel which he helped found in 1992.

Paradoxically, yesterday was a special holiday to honour the crime busters of the Moscow police force.