Manager Murdered

The deputy manager of German publisher, Bertelsmann's Russia office was found dead in her country house outside of Moscow, Russian prosecutors said in a statement on Monday.

"The body of 47-year old Marina Pisareva was found on the morning of July 15 ... with stab wounds," the prosecutor said in a statement posted on the department's Internet site. "Different scenarios are being investigated including the one that the murder was connected with the work of M. Pisareva."

Investigators said nothing appeared to be stolen from Pisareva's house and that she was killed with a rare dagger that belonged to her and was recovered at the scene.

Motive for murder remains unknown

Bertelsmann, however, said Monday that there was no evidence of a connection between the murder and the publisher's business activities.

"Bertelsmann Media Moscow publishes coffee table books and had no political content," said Klaus Markus, a spokesman for Bertelsmann DirectGroup, which has operated in Russia since 1992 and employs 17 people.

A media conglomerate, Bertelsmann has branches dealing with television, book and magazine publishing, and music sales. The firm, whose divisions span US publisher Random House and Europe's largest commercial broadcaster, RTL Group, earned 2.4 billion euros ($3.3 billion) of net profit in 2006. The German company also has interests in Russian publishing and television, including a stake in national television channel Ren-TV.

Spate of high-profile killings

Though contract killings are less common in Russia than directly after the break up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, there has been a series of high-profile assassinations in recent months.

Central banker Andrei Kozlov, who led the fight against corruption in the nation's banking industry, was assassinated in September, Zelikhman Magomedov, an oil industry consultant, was killed in Moscow in November, and Enver Ziganshin, chief engineer of a BP Russia Petroleum unit, was killed in September.

Several media representatives have also been murdered in recent years. Last October Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist known for holding views critical of the Kremlin, was killed. In July 2004 Paul Klebnikov, head of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was shot in the street. Neither of the murders have been solved.

The International Journalists Association estimated that nearly 300 journalists have been killed in Russia in the last 14 years, with over 80 of the deaths having a connection to the journalists' professional work.