Police have already linked the murders of Igor Klimov and Sergei Shchitko, shot dead within hours of each other last Friday.

The hits were the culmination of a series of apparent contract killings in the past few weeks targetting businessmen, state officials and politicians.

Shchitko was an excutive and Klimov the interim head of Almaz Antei, Russia's biggest designer and manufacturer of air and space defense weapons. The company was created by presidential decree last year.

"This is the first instance of such a high-ranking director in the military industry, and so close to the Kremlin, being killed," business daily Vedomosti wrote Monday.

Klimov, a former foreign intelligence and Kremlin official, was personally appointed to head the company by Viktor Ivanov, deputy chief of the Kremlin administration and a close confidant of Putin.

He was shot dead near his home in central Moscow early Friday by a man who tried to seize some documents he was carrying. Hours later, Shchitko was found dead with gunshot wounds to the head in his car in the Moscow suburb of Sepukhov.

Observers and media in Russia have run wild with theories on the killings, proposing that the hits were ordered by competing groups aiming to take hold of the defense industry's billions.

The industry has exported 2.5 billion dollars (2.1 billion euros) worth of ground-to-air defense systems over the past seven years, according to the daily Gazeta.

Putin aimed to consolidate and grow those exports by setting up Almaz Antei, which produces S-300 medium-range surface-to-air missiles -- Russia's equivalent of the US Patriot missile.

Instead, the double murder has shown just how little control the Kremlin has over Russian industry and the corrupt, criminal elements so often associated with it, observers said.

Even the Russian intelligence services "have become criminalized -- they have in part become 'privatized' by influence groups and defend their financial and political interests," said Sergei Grigoriants, a member of the Glasnost human rights group and a Soviet-era dissident.

Putin "is merely a player on this stage -- the most visible, but not the most influential," he warned.

Putin's election in March 2000 -- which came in large part thanks to his law and order pledges -- has been followed instead by a string of assassinations in Russia's business, political and defense spheres.

On June 3, the wealthy director of the Meyerhold theater center -- a large cultural and commercial complex in central Moscow -- was gunned down by a motorcyclist in broad daylight.

On May 28, a regional director of oil major Yukos, Farit Gazimov, was killed in the Siberian city of Irkutsk.

Two weeks earlier on May 15, the mayor of the Moscow suburb of Troitsk, Vadim Naydenov, was shot dead by unknown assailants.

These killings made barely a ripple compared to the April 10 murder of Sergei Yushenkov, a respected deputy in the State Duma lower house of parliament, who was the ninth deputy to be killed in as many years.

Like the majority of contract killings in Russia, none of the killings of lawmakers has been solved.

The spate of murders appeared to be launched by the assassination last October of Magadan governor Valentin Tsvetkov, who was shot dead in broad daylight in central Moscow.

That killing -- the first of a Russian regional governor -- was believed to be related to Tsvetkov's links to the region's gold-mining industry.

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