Colonel Salman Arapkhanov was attacked by unidentified gunmen armed with automatic weapons as he left his home in the town of Ordzhonikidzevskaya in the east of Ingushetia late on Wednesday.
"Doctors were unable to save the colonel's life as he had been seriously wounded. He was shot at point blank range," a local police source said.
An investigation has been opened into the murder. "The search for Arapkhanov's killers is underway. No one has been detained so far," a police officer said.
The colonel's murder is the latest in a series of similar attacks on police and other officials in Ingushetia, a republic neighboring Chechnya, which saw two Russian military campaigns against separatists in the 1990s-early 2000s.
The republic has also recently seen several apparently ethnically-motivated attacks on Russians.
