Three Moscow police officers were detained on suspicion of severely beating a man from the breakaway Georgian republic of Abkhazia who died shortly afterwards, Interfax news agency reported on Tuesday.

The three policemen from the same unit have confessed to the attack, which they carried out while drunk, Interfax said, citing an unnamed security source.

The Moscow police chief responded by suspending the commander of the unit where the three men served, state news agency RIA Novosti reported.

Police officers detained

Investigators said earlier they detained one policeman and were questioning two of his colleagues for beating up two men from Abkhazia, one of whom later died inside a pharmacy.

The dead man was named as Eduard Gurtskaya (19) Interfax said.

The attack comes as a new blow to the reputation of the Russian police service, already rocked by a supermarket shooting spree by a Moscow police officer in April this year that killed two people and wounded seven.

In two separate violent attacks against police in southern Russia, a beheaded police officer and court bailiff were found in the boot of a car and a police officer was killed along with his daughter in a drive-by shooting.

The headless corpses were found in the boot of a Mercedes owned by the bailiff in the southern Russian region of Kabardino-Balkaria, Interfax reported on Tuesday.

Separately, a police officer was shot dead in his car in a drive-by shooting along with his 11-year old daughter in the volatile southern republic of Ingushetia, officials said. His wife was injured in the attack.

Senior lieutenant Khadzhibrakar Buzurtanov was sprayed with machine gun fire by unknown attackers in a car without number plates, the federal investigative committee said in a statement.

The killings took place outside a high school, investigators said.

AFP

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