Moscow ? Andrei Kozlov, a top central banker crusading against money-laundering, had just finished playing soccer with colleagues when two assailants pumped him full of bullets.

Officials suspect the slaying was ordered by crooked financiers unhappy with Kozlov’s drive to clean up the system – underscoring how Vladimir Putin’s Russia remains a cauldron of murky business interests rife with gangland killings.

The assassins fled in the darkness, leaving their guns behind – the signature of a contract killing. There were no surveillance cameras in the area, and no one could describe the gunmen.

Kozlov, the bank’s first deputy chairman, died in a hospital early Thursday hours after he was shot, Moscow prosecutor’s office said.