BAKU - Authorities in former Soviet Azerbaijan named a citizen of neighboring Georgia as their top suspect in the March slaying of a journalist critical of the oil-rich nation's regime, Tuesday.
Tair Khubanov, 46, is suspected of having come to Baku in January to track the editor of the Monitor weekly Elmar Heseynov before shooting him to death in a stairwell in front of his family's apartment, the security and interior ministries and prosecutors said in a joint statement.
Khubanov is believed to have left Azerbaijan the day of the murder.
Huseynov's killing sparked an outcry in the media and among human rights groups which asserted the murder was directly related to his work for the opposition weekly The Monitor.
Immediately after the killing, Azeri president Ilham Aliyev portrayed the event as a political "provocation" unrelated to a crackdown on media cited by rights groups and branded it as an attempt by unspecified forces to damage the nation's reputation ahead of parliamentary elections in November.
"From the very beginning of the investigation the authorities have tried to shift blame for the murder outside of Azerbaijan to groups in neighboring countries," Huseynov's widow Roshana Huseynova recently said.
05/03/2005 18:17 GMT