Perhaps it belonged to a criminal with a grudge - such weapons can be found on the black market. When he was finally killed, detectives discovered that the weapon was a special issue police pistol. (His response was to start criminal proceedings against them.)In another particularly sinister incident, a fortnight before he was shot, he found the brake cables in his car had been severed. On one occasion, he was sacked and then - after bombarding the authorities with letters - reinstated, after proving his firing was illegal.As time passed, the threats against him became graver.

In March, he was stopped by police from the Interior Ministry in Saratov, handcuffed, and taken to a station where he was roughed up. His family and friends say that over his 25 years as a policeman he had 17 disciplinary actions filed against him. "I told him that he was an idiot, and that he will be killed," she said, "I asked him who would look after his children?" His wife died nine years ago. "He just laughed and said - you can."Yet, while cheerfully waving away the concerns of his family and friends, he was well aware his zeal had made him enemies That much was clear from his own experience. But I do believe they were from law enforcement."It was Mrs Baronova who warned Major Lykov during a telephone conversation just before his death.He was in high spirits, having just returned from a trip to Moscow, 500 miles away, where he took part in a press conference on crime in the police force, organised by the human rights group the Glasnost Foundation. "I can't say whether they were the police, the security services, the prosecutors or who it was. "I believe those who ordered the murder are from somewhere within law enforcement," said Svetlana Baronova, a lawyer and close friend of the major's who used to work with him in the force.

Last year he wrote to the governor of Saratov complaining about a local politician who was secretly in cahoots with the local security services. "It is," he wrote, "immoral and unacceptable."That is why everyone knew he was in danger. He wrote articles for the local press on police methods of hiring informants Sometimes he named names. Now that would not happen in America, would it, if a cop was killed?"By the time he was murdered, aged 45, Igor Lykov had a quixotic reputation as a self-appointed, legally-literate one-man unit fighting to clean up a police and judicial system that is widely acknowledged to one of the most corrupt in the world.Top Russian newspapers such as Izvestia published interviews with him; he had appeared on national television; he attended human rights conferences in Moscow on corruption in the security services. "It was an embarrassment," recalled his friend, Alexander Pronin, a former KGB officer in Saratov "No one from the higher administration turned up.