LATE on February 27th Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader and former deputy prime minister, was shot four times in the back just a stone’s throw from the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, condemned the killing and promised to investigate. The brutality of what looks like a political assassination is shocking (even by the standards of an increasingly autocratic Russia), but such targeted killings have been on the rise since the 1970s, according to a report from the Combating Counter Terrorism Centre, a military think-tank.
Analysis of 758 assassinations suggests that 15 political targets were murdered each year from 1970 to 2013, up from just 5 per year from 1945-1969. A fifth of those in the more recent period took place in the Middle East and North Africa region. Killings in South-Asian countries have seen the biggest spike in recent years. Over three-quarters of them occurred after 1985 as Afghanistan and Pakistan became less stable. Assassinations in Russia and Eastern Europe, which rose sharply after 1995 amid a rocky transition towards democracy, make up 8% of all killings.
