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Ex St Petersburg mayor dies

ST PETERSBURG: Anatoly Sobchak, the former mayor of St Petersburg and one of the leading figures in Russia's reform movement in the 1980s and early 1990s, has died of a heart attack, officials said on Sunday.

A spokesman for the Emergencies Ministry of the North West region of Russia said Sobchak, 62, died of a heart attack while staying in a sanatorium in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea.

Sobchak's political career seemed set for a new lease of life due to his links with Acting President Vladimir Putin and the Emergencies Ministry spokesman said Sobchak had been in Kaliningrad as Putin's official representative.

Putin worked as Sobchak's deputy in St Petersburg and was also taught law in the Soviet era by Sobchak at the then Leningrad university.

Sobchak was one of the early allies of former President Boris Yeltsin when the two were among the leaders of a group of outspoken deputies in former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's Congress of Peoples Deputies in 1989.

He became mayor of St Petersburg in 1991 but was voted out of the post in June 1996. He left for France in November 1997 as he believed he was about to be arrested under corruption charges, which he denied.

He returned to Russia in July 1999.

Putin has drafted many of his former colleagues from St Petersburg into his presidential team, leading one newspaper to joke about a "Putinburg on the Moscow river". Sobchak had also been tipped for a government job.-Reuters