Russian businessman Shabtai Kalmanovitch, who was convicted in Israel in 1987 of being a KGB spy, was shot dead in Moscow on Monday, police said.
Kalmanovitch, 60, was gunned down near his apartment in central Moscow after unidentified men opened fire on his Mercedes from a passing car, Moscow city police said. His driver was wounded, but tried to pursue the car for several blocks, police said.
The killing appeared to have been "carefully planned," the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted an unidentified police official as saying. But there was no immediate information about who could have carried out the killing and what may have motivated it.
Born in Soviet Lithuania in 1949, Kalmanovitch and his family immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he worked as a government adviser on the resettlement of Soviet Jews.
He reportedly agreed to spy for the KGB in return for his emigration permit, and in December 1987, Kalmanovitch was convicted of spying and was sentenced to nine years' imprisonment.
In 1988, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin lauded Kalmanovitch's capture and said he believed information that the Russian spy had passed to his country had ended up in the hands of Israel's enemies.
He served five years and three months before a persistent campaign by his attorney, Amnon Zichroni, and quiet negotiations with the Soviet authorities paid off. In 1993, Kalmanovitch's sentence was commuted by then-president Chaim Herzog.
He relocated to Sierra Leone, where he made a fortune in the diamond trade.
From 1994 on, Kalmanovitch worked in Moscow as director-general of the large Tishinsky shopping center. He also sponsored three basketball clubs, and was named chief executive of Spartak's women's basketball team in 2008.
