Vladikavkaz mayor killed in gun-fire attack

Vladikavkaz mayor Vitaly Karayev was assassinated in North Ossetia Wednesday. Karayev died at the intensive care unit of the Republican Hospital. The incident took place at about 9:00 Moscow time. Karayev’s car was shelled; the mayor received numerous bullet wounds and was hospitalized.

Photo: Vladikavkaz mayor killed in gun-fire attack

Doctors took lifesaving efforts, but they brought no results. The mayor died of the wounds, Interfax reports. “Karayev suffered severe bullet wounds, including a wound of the heart. He died at the hospital,” a source from the local law-enforcement authorities said.

Police have sealed off the site of the incident and filed investigation into the assassination of the mayor. North Ossetia’s President Taimuraz Mamsurov said that he did not have any version to explain the assassination of Vladikavkaz mayor. “He has just started working on the position,” Mamsurov said.

Vitaly Karayev took office less than a year ago. His deputy, Mayram Tamayev, suffered an attempted assassination not so long ago. A bomb exploded in his car, but the official did mot suffer life-threatening injuries.

Vitaly Karayev was born June 10, 1962 in the settlement of Chermen. He finished an eight-year secondary school and entered the North-Caucasian Construction School. In 1987 he graduated from the Economic Department of the North Ossetian State University.

He chaired the administration of his native settlement, Chermen, in 1994. In 2005 Karayev became deputy head of the North Ossetian administration. He took the position of Vladikavkaz mayor in February 2008.

Karayev was married and had three children.

North Ossetia was the center of the Beslan school siege in 2004, when a group of Chechen terrorists took more than a thousand schoolchildren and their teachers hostage. Over 300 children and adults were killed in the siege.