Two gunmen shot dead a ruling party official on Tuesday in Russia's North Caucasus, where the Kremlin is fighting to subdue an Islamist insurgency, investigators said. Unknown assailants burst into Boris Zherukov's office in Nalchik, capital of the province of Kabardino-Balkaria, and shot him twice in the head, Russia's Investigative Committee said in a statement.

Zherukov was head of President Vladimir Putin's ruling United Russia party faction in the local parliament. He was also rector of the local State Agricultural University. Insurgents fighting to carve an Islamic state out of a patchwork of mainly Muslim regions in Russia's mountainous south stage near-daily shootings and bomb attacks targeting officials and police. The violence - fuelled by discontent over joblessness, corruption and police brutality - is mostly limited to the North Caucasus, where the Kremlin fought two wars against separatist rebels in Chechnya since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Copyright Reuters, 2012