Roman Ashuba, an official of a local village administration in the Tkvarcheli district of breakaway Abkhazia, was killed in the Gali district on October 24, the Abkhaz news agency, Apsnipress, reported.

Otar Khetsia, the breakaway region’s interior minister, said that Ashuba’s car, also carrying three other men, was stopped by three unknown persons in the village of Dikhazurga in the Gali district. “They forced them out of the car and shot dead Ashuba,” Khetsia said, adding that the three others “were not touched.”

Eduard Emin-Zade, chief of the Abkhaz defense ministry’s intelligence unit, was killed in Gali on October 22. The Abkhaz officials blamed “a group of Georgian saboteurs” for both murders. Officials from the Tbilisi-loyal Abkhaz government-in-exile, however, have claimed that both murders were linked to an internal power struggle between Abkhaz “criminal groups.”