Two masked gunmen were waiting for Slavko Curuvija and his wife, Vesna Prpa, when they reached their drab apartment building at No 35 Lole Ribara Street in Belgrade after an Orthodox Easter Sunday walk. One of them used his gun to knock Mrs Prpa to the ground as the other opened fire on her 50-year-old husband, a prominent newspaper editor.
The gunmen fired 11 bullets in all, the last two at close range into Mr Curuvija's head. Then they walked calmly away. As the journalist's frightened colleagues noted yesterday, it was a professional job.
Serbian newspapers published only a cryptic, three-sentence announcement by the official news agency Tanjug, quoting Belgrade police saying that Mr Curuvija owned the Dnevi Telegraf (Daily Telegraph) newspaper and "was shot dead by a person or persons unknown". Plainclothes policemen, one holding a huge mastiff on a leash, still lingered on the pavement at the scene of the murder 24 hours later. In this crime-ridden capital of a country at war, the statement that "an investigation is in progress" impressed no one.
Mr Curuvija's story was that of the rise and fall of the independent media in Serbia, but it was also one of personal ambition and dangerous political liaisons both inside and outside the country. By his own admission, the murder victim started his career as an intelligence analyst for the Yugoslav secret police.
When he moved to journalism, he maintained his links with Belgrade's murky police milieu. People wondered where he obtained the money to launch first a weekly and then a daily newspaper; he claimed the funds came from his brother in Poland. The thick, tabloid-style Telegraph quickly became Serbia's best-selling newspaper, famous for its inside stories of political life.
Contacts count for everything here, and Mr Curuvija liked to boast about his family ties with President Slobodan Milosevic and his wife, Mrs Mira Markovic. "He was ambitious; he wanted to be a big press baron, and maybe go into politics," a Serbian journalist said. "He didn't want to mix with the rest of the independent press - he said: `I'm making money, and the rest of you live on handouts.' "
According to a well-placed Belgrade press source, Mr Curuvija's problems started when he mentioned to Mrs Markovic one day that her husband could only serve two terms as president, and that they ought to think about preparing someone else. "It could be me," he suggested.
Gifted with a brilliant mind, tall-dark-and-handsome looks, a weakness for designer clothes and immense arrogance, he had already assured himself a place in Belgrade high society and seemed cut out for politics.
Perhaps it all went to his head. Last October, when NATO first threatened to bomb Serbia after massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Mr Curuvija and a colleague addressed a 16-point political programme in the form of an open letter to President Milosevic. It urged the Yugoslav leader to get rid of those who were "pushing the country to disaster - your coalition partners and the people around you who are gangsters, looters and war profiteers". If Mr Milosevic did so, Mr Curuvija suggested, Yugoslavia might be accepted within Europe.
The country's rubber-stamp parliament had been considering a new law on information for some time and the legislation was rushed through to deal with Mr Curuvija's outburst. It authorises low-level criminal court judges to fine the media exorbitant amounts of money for almost anything they publish or broadcast. Mr Curuvija was charged $100,000 for his open letter.
Under the new law, the police have the right to confiscate press property, and then the owner's private belongings if he does not have the means to pay.
Mr Curuvija then moved his newspaper headquarters to Montenegro, leaving his Belgrade operation as a mere correspondent's office. The government stopped trains to Belgrade and seized every issue. Some copies were smuggled to Serbia - at most 2,000 copies a day - and sold under the counter, like samizdat news-sheets in the former Soviet Union. The ill-fated editor moved to Banja Luka, Bosnia, and then to Zagreb, Croatia, but the Belgrade authorities intercepted his shipments and sold them as scrap paper.
That was when Slavko Curuvija became an internationally renowned "champion of the free press", extracting quickly broken promises from EU and US officials to protect the Yugoslav media. At the end of 1998, he travelled to Washington for meetings with State Department officials and congressional committees. Word got back to Belgrade that he advocated bombing as the only way to stop Mr Milosevic.
Last week, the state-run newspaper Politika Ekspres published an editorial that may have been Mr Curuvija's death sentence. "People like Slavko Curuvija, who asked NATO to bomb us and kill our children, must be happy now," it said. At an April 9th meeting between Serb editors and the hardline Serbian information minister, one editor complained that although he did not like Mr Curuvija, "now is not the time to attack colleagues in print . . . Are you aware that after this someone may kill him?" In a heated exchange, the editor of Politika responded: "He is a fascist and he deserved it."
So who killed Slavko Curuvija? The grief-stricken relative of a war victim? Or one of the many people to whom he owed money?
Speculation centred on Mr Voijslav Seselj's ultra-nationalist Radical Party. Most of Mr Curuvija's colleagues believe his murder was politically motivated, and they wait fearfully for the men in ski masks to claim their next victim.